SSA3D: Semantic Segmentation Assisted One-Stage Three-Dimensional Vehicle Object Detection

One-stage 3D object detection using mobile light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has developed rapidly in recent years. Specifically, one-stage methods have attracted attention because of their high efficiency and light weight compared with two-stage methods. Inspired by this, we present the semantic segmentation assisted one-stage three-dimensional vehicle object detection (SSA3D), a network for the rapid detection of objects that keeps the advantages of the semantic segmentation module in the two-stage methods without increasing redundant computational load. First, we modified the sampling of the farthest point to improve the quality of the sampling points. This helps to reduce sampling outlier points and bad points that are difficult to perceive in the spatial structure information surrounding the point. Second, a neighbor attention group module is devoted to selectively add extra weight to neighbor points because of the different importance of neighbor points for the corresponding sampling point. Correctly increasing the weight is helpful to obtain richer spatial structure information. Finally, a delicate box generation module is included as a voted center point layer based on the generalized Hoff vote method and an anchor-free regression. We used the feature aggregation module as the backbone and the feature propagation module as the auxiliary network to achieve efficiency. At the same time, the auxiliary network retains the ability to extract point-wise features from the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation network. In experiments, we evaluated and tested the SSA3D on a common KITTI dataset and achieved improved performance in the class of car accuracy.