Addressing the Gaps of IoU Loss in 3D Object Detection with IIoU

Abstract

Three-dimensional object detection involves estimating the dimensions, orientations, and locations of 3D bounding boxes. Intersection of Union (IoU) loss measures the overlap between predicted 3D box and ground truth 3D bounding boxes. The localization task uses smooth-L1 loss with IoU to estimate the object’s location, and the classification task identifies the object/class category inside each 3D bounding box. Localization suffers a performance gap in cases where the predicted and ground truth boxes overlap significantly less or do not overlap, indicating the boxes are far away, and in scenarios where the boxes are inclusive. Existing axis-aligned IoU losses suffer performance drop in cases of rotated 3D bounding boxes. This research addresses the shortcomings in bounding box regression problems of 3D object detection by introducing an Improved Intersection Over Union (IIoU) loss. The proposed loss function’s performance is experimented on LiDAR-based and Camera-LiDAR-based fusion methods using the KITTI dataset.