PillarNeXt: Rethinking Network Designs for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR
  Point Clouds
Jinyu Li Chenxu Luo Xiaodong Yang
In order to deal with the sparse and unstructured raw point clouds, LiDAR
based 3D object detection research mostly focuses on designing dedicated local
point aggregators for fine-grained geometrical modeling. In this paper, we
revisit the local point aggregators from the perspective of allocating
computational resources. We find that the simplest pillar based models perform
surprisingly well considering both accuracy and latency. Additionally, we show
that minimal adaptions from the success of 2D object detection, such as
enlarging receptive field, significantly boost the performance. Extensive
experiments reveal that our pillar based networks with modernized designs in
terms of architecture and training render the state-of-the-art performance on
the two popular benchmarks: Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes. Our results
challenge the common intuition that the detailed geometry modeling is essential
to achieve high performance for 3D object detection.