LEF: Late-to-Early Temporal Fusion for LiDAR 3D Object Detection
Tong He Pei Sun Zhaoqi Leng Chenxi Liu Dragomir Anguelov Mingxing Tan
We propose a late-to-early recurrent feature fusion scheme for 3D object
detection using temporal LiDAR point clouds. Our main motivation is fusing
object-aware latent embeddings into the early stages of a 3D object detector.
This feature fusion strategy enables the model to better capture the shapes and
poses for challenging objects, compared with learning from raw points directly.
Our method conducts late-to-early feature fusion in a recurrent manner. This is
achieved by enforcing window-based attention blocks upon temporally calibrated
and aligned sparse pillar tokens. Leveraging bird's eye view foreground pillar
segmentation, we reduce the number of sparse history features that our model
needs to fuse into its current frame by 10$\times$. We also propose a
stochastic-length FrameDrop training technique, which generalizes the model to
variable frame lengths at inference for improved performance without
retraining. We evaluate our method on the widely adopted Waymo Open Dataset and
demonstrate improvement on 3D object detection against the baseline model,
especially for the challenging category of large objects.