Real-Time Stereo 3D Car Detection With Shape-Aware Non-Uniform Sampling

Pseudo-LiDAR based stereo 3D detectors have gained popularity due to their high accuracy. However, these methods need dense depth supervision and suffer from inferior speed. To solve these two issues, a recently introduced RTS3D builds an efficient 4D feature-consistency embedding (FCE) space for the object intermediate representation without depth supervision, where FCE space performs uniform sampling to generate feature sampling points, which ignores the importance of different object regions. In this paper, we observe that, compared with the inner region, the outer region of the object plays a more important role for accurate 3D detection. To fully exploit the useful information from the outer region, we propose a novel shape-aware non-uniform sampling strategy. Instead of uniform sampling, our proposed non-uniform sampling strategy performs dense sampling in outer region and sparse sampling in inner region. Therefore, more points are sampled from the outer region and more useful features are extracted for 3D detection. In addition, we design a high-level semantic enhanced FCE module to exploit more contextual information and suppress noise better. As a result, it further improves feature discrimination of each sampling point. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the baseline RTS3D, our proposed method has 2.57% improvement on car AP
$_{3d}$
almost without extra network parameters. Moreover, our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without extra supervision at a real-time speed.