SeaBird: Segmentation in Bird's View with Dice Loss Improves Monocular
  3D Detection of Large Objects
Abhinav Kumar Yuliang Guo Xinyu Huang Liu Ren Xiaoming Liu
Monocular 3D detectors achieve remarkable performance on cars and smaller
objects. However, their performance drops on larger objects, leading to fatal
accidents. Some attribute the failures to training data scarcity or their
receptive field requirements of large objects. In this paper, we highlight this
understudied problem of generalization to large objects. We find that modern
frontal detectors struggle to generalize to large objects even on nearly
balanced datasets. We argue that the cause of failure is the sensitivity of
depth regression losses to noise of larger objects. To bridge this gap, we
comprehensively investigate regression and dice losses, examining their
robustness under varying error levels and object sizes. We mathematically prove
that the dice loss leads to superior noise-robustness and model convergence for
large objects compared to regression losses for a simplified case. Leveraging
our theoretical insights, we propose SeaBird (Segmentation in Bird's View) as
the first step towards generalizing to large objects. SeaBird effectively
integrates BEV segmentation on foreground objects for 3D detection, with the
segmentation head trained with the dice loss. SeaBird achieves SoTA results on
the KITTI-360 leaderboard and improves existing detectors on the nuScenes
leaderboard, particularly for large objects. Code and models at
https://github.com/abhi1kumar/SeaBird