Improving Height Prediction for Vision-Based Roadside 3D Object Detection

Roadside vision-based 3D object detection is vital in many applications, such as autonomous driving. The mainstream methods enhance the accuracy of distance estimation by converting predicted height distribution into depth distribution. However, predicting object’s height in roadside perception is challenging, particularly for distant and small objects. Therefore, this work proposes a series of methods to optimize height prediction. Firstly, we propose depth and height decoding supervision methods to optimize the height network by supervising the decoded depth and height values. Then, a height distribution alignment loss is introduced to optimize the height network by constraining the consistency of height distributions among objects of the same category. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed optimization methods can effectively improve the accuracy of roadside vision-based 3D object detection. For instance, our methods improve the accuracies by 2.31%, 4.33%, and 4.24% for the cyclist category at easy, medium, and hard levels, respectively.