ER3D: An Efficient Real-time 3D Object Detection Framework for Autonomous Driving

3D object detection is a vital computer vision task in mobile robotics and autonomous driving. However, most existing methods have exclusively focused on achieving high accuracy, leading to complex and bulky systems that can not be deployed in a real-time manner. In this paper, we propose the ER3D (Efficient and Real-time 3D) object detection framework, which takes stereo images as input and predicts 3D bounding boxes. Instead of using the complex network architecture, we leverage a fast-but-inaccurate method of semi-global matching (SGM) for depth estimation. To eliminate the accuracy degradation in 3D detection caused by inaccurate depth estimation, we introduce decoupled regression head and 3D distance-consistency loU loss to boost the accuracy performance of the 3D detector with a small computing overhead. ER3D achieves both high-precision and real-time performance to enable practical applications of 3D object detection systems on robotic systems. Extensive experiments with the comparison of the state of the arts demonstrate the superior practicability of ER3D, which achieves comparable detection accuracy with significant leadership on inference efficiency.