Joint Semi-Supervised and Active Learning via 3D Consistency for 3D Object Detection

Autonomous driving powered by deep learning requires large-scale, high-quality training data from diverse driving environments to operate effectively worldwide. However, collecting and annotating such data is costly and time-consuming. To address this challenge, active learning methods have been explored to select the most informative data samples for training. Nevertheless, most existing methods focus on 2D tasks and do not fully exploit the value of unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised active learning approach for 3D object detection tasks that leverages the potential of collected data and reduces annotation costs. Our method considers the 3D consistency of bounding box predictions in both semi-supervised and active learning processes, thereby improving the performance of point cloud-based 3D object detection models. Our framework specifically utilizes self-supervision to decrease bounding box uncertainties. Moreover, it selects objects that are either occluded or distant and still exhibit high uncertainty for annotation even after semi-supervised training has decreased their uncertainty. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our semi-supervised active learning approach selects objects with high measurement uncertainties and enhances the model's ability to detect occluded objects. Our approach improves the baseline by more than 60% (+17.12 mAP) when using only 1500 annotated frames.