Improved Point-Voxel Region Convolutional Neural Network: 3D Object Detectors for Autonomous Driving

Recently, 3D object detection based on deep learning has achieved impressive performance in complex indoor and outdoor scenes. Among the methods, the two-stage detection method performs the best; however, this method still needs improved accuracy and efficiency, especially for small size objects or autonomous driving scenes. In this paper, we propose an improved 3D object detection method based on a two-stage detector called the Improved Point-Voxel Region Convolutional Neural Network (IPV-RCNN). Our proposed method contains online training for data augmentation, upsampling convolution and k-means clustering for the bounding box to achieve 3D detection tasks from raw point clouds. The evaluation results on the KITTI 3D dataset show that the IPV-RCNN achieved a 96% mAP, which is 3% more accurate than the state-of-the-art detectors.