TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers

Engineering notes

TransFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale datasets.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

LiDAR and camera are two important sensors for 3D object detection in autonomous driving. Despite the increasing popularity of sensor fusion in this field, the robustness against inferior image conditions, e.g., bad illumination and sensor misalignment, is under-explored. Existing fusion methods are easily affected by such conditions, mainly due to a hard association of LiDAR points and image pixels, established by calibration matrices. We propose TransFusion, a robust solution to LiDAR-camera fusion with a soft-association mechanism to handle inferior image conditions. Specifically, our TransFusion consists of convolutional backbones and a detection head based on a transformer decoder. The first layer of the decoder predicts initial bounding boxes from a LiDAR point cloud using a sparse set of object queries, and its second decoder layer adaptively fuses the object queries with useful image features, leveraging both spatial and contextual relationships. The attention mechanism of the transformer enables our model to adaptively determine where and what information should be taken from the image, leading to a robust and effective fusion strategy. We additionally design an image-guided query initialization strategy to deal with objects that are difficult to detect in point clouds. TransFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale datasets. We provide extensive experiments to demonstrate its robustness against degenerated image quality and calibration errors. We also extend the proposed method to the 3D tracking task and achieve the 1st place in the leader-board of nuScenes tracking, showing its effectiveness and generalization capability. [code release]

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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