RDNet: Rotate-Groundtruth Augmentation and Decoupled Attention HEAD for 3D Object Detection

LiDAR is one of the most important sensors in the field of autonomous driving and allows for better and more accurate perception of the changes in the surrounding environment. Most of the existing 3D object detection methods use data augmentation and feature fusion enhancement to improve the performance of detection, but the majority of the methods ignore the handling of sample imbalance problems during data augmentation. Also, the designed feature fusion and enhancement methods were not well suited to work with the enhancement methods. To this end, we developed a combined method involving data augmentation and feature enhancement. The designed approach has two main objectives: 1) to address the problem of unbalanced sample distribution in detection scenes through data augmentation, and 2) to enhance feature perception using a special feature enhancement module. Our proposed method solves the problem of class imbalance by directly increasing the number of pedestrian samples in the scene through mixed data augmentation, i.e., RG-Aug. In addition, we introduce the Decoupling and Attention Fusion module (DAF), which combines classification headers with high-level features and prediction branches with low-level features. Leverage data features between different layers of features to get a more robust feature representation. Finally, the multi-scale pyramid attention enhancement module is designed to achieve feature enhancement of multi-scale features by means of attention to improve the detection ability of small objects in the scene, especially the detection ability of pedestrians. Our method can achieve 1.57%, 2.16%, and 2.05% performance improvement on the KITTI dataset for Easy, Mod, and Hard samples, respectively. Furthermore, for the detection of pedestrians, our method has a significant competitive advantage over other state-of-the-art techniques with a mAP of 73.42%.