# SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation
## Abstract
> [SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation](https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10111)
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Estimating 3D orientation and translation of objects is essential for infrastructure-less autonomous navigation and driving. In case of monocular vision, successful methods have been mainly based on two ingredients: (i) a network generating 2D region proposals, (ii) a R-CNN structure predicting 3D object pose by utilizing the acquired regions of interest. We argue that the 2D detection network is redundant and introduces non-negligible noise for 3D detection. Hence, we propose a novel 3D object detection method, named SMOKE, in this paper that predicts a 3D bounding box for each detected object by combining a single keypoint estimate with regressed 3D variables. As a second contribution, we propose a multi-step disentangling approach for constructing the 3D bounding box, which significantly improves both training convergence and detection accuracy. In contrast to previous 3D detection techniques, our method does not require complicated pre/post-processing, extra data, and a refinement stage. Despite of its structural simplicity, our proposed SMOKE network outperforms all existing monocular 3D detection methods on the KITTI dataset, giving the best state-of-the-art result on both 3D object detection and Bird's eye view evaluation.
## Abstract
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Estimating 3D orientation and translation of objects is essential for infrastructure-less autonomous navigation and driving. In case of monocular vision, successful methods have been mainly based on two ingredients: (i) a network generating 2D region proposals, (ii) a R-CNN structure predicting 3D object pose by utilizing the acquired regions of interest. We argue that the 2D detection network is redundant and introduces non-negligible noise for 3D detection. Hence, we propose a novel 3D object detection method, named SMOKE, in this paper that predicts a 3D bounding box for each detected object by combining a single keypoint estimate with regressed 3D variables. As a second contribution, we propose a multi-step disentangling approach for constructing the 3D bounding box, which significantly improves both training convergence and detection accuracy. In contrast to previous 3D detection techniques, our method does not require complicated pre/post-processing, extra data, and a refinement stage. Despite of its structural simplicity, our proposed SMOKE network outperforms all existing monocular 3D detection methods on the KITTI dataset, giving the best state-of-the-art result on both 3D object detection and Bird's eye view evaluation.
# SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds
## Abstract
> [SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02774)
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Multi-class 3D object detection aims to localize and classify objects of multiple categories from point clouds. Due to the nature of point clouds, i.e. unstructured, sparse and noisy, some features benefit-ting multi-class discrimination are underexploited, such as shape information. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D shape signature to explore the shape information from point clouds. By incorporating operations of symmetry, convex hull and chebyshev fitting, the proposed shape sig-nature is not only compact and effective but also robust to the noise, which serves as a soft constraint to improve the feature capability of multi-class discrimination. Based on the proposed shape signature, we develop the shape signature networks (SSN) for 3D object detection, which consist of pyramid feature encoding part, shape-aware grouping heads and explicit shape encoding objective. Experiments show that the proposed method performs remarkably better than existing methods on two large-scale datasets. Furthermore, our shape signature can act as a plug-and-play component and ablation study shows its effectiveness and good scalability.
## Abstract
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Multi-class 3D object detection aims to localize and classify objects of multiple categories from point clouds. Due to the nature of point clouds, i.e. unstructured, sparse and noisy, some features benefit-ting multi-class discrimination are underexploited, such as shape information. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D shape signature to explore the shape information from point clouds. By incorporating operations of symmetry, convex hull and chebyshev fitting, the proposed shape sig-nature is not only compact and effective but also robust to the noise, which serves as a soft constraint to improve the feature capability of multi-class discrimination. Based on the proposed shape signature, we develop the shape signature networks (SSN) for 3D object detection, which consist of pyramid feature encoding part, shape-aware grouping heads and explicit shape encoding objective. Experiments show that the proposed method performs remarkably better than existing methods on two large-scale datasets. Furthermore, our shape signature can act as a plug-and-play component and ablation study shows its effectiveness and good scalability.
We implement PointPillars with Shape-aware grouping heads used in the SSN and provide the results and checkpoints on the nuScenes and Lyft dataset.
```
@inproceedings{zhu2020ssn,
title={SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds},
author={Zhu, Xinge and Ma, Yuexin and Wang, Tai and Xu, Yan and Shi, Jianping and Lin, Dahua},
booktitle={Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision},
year={2020}
}
```
## Results
## Results and models
### NuScenes
...
...
@@ -54,3 +40,14 @@ Note:
The main difference of the shape-aware grouping heads with the original SECOND FPN heads is that the former groups objects with similar sizes and shapes together, and design shape-specific heads for each group. Heavier heads (with more convolutions and large strides) are designed for large objects while smaller heads for small objects. Note that there may appear different feature map sizes in the outputs, so an anchor generator tailored to these feature maps is also needed in the implementation.
Users could try other settings in terms of the head design. Here we basically refer to the implementation [HERE](https://github.com/xinge008/SSN).
## Citation
```latex
@inproceedings{zhu2020ssn,
title={SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds},
author={Zhu, Xinge and Ma, Yuexin and Wang, Tai and Xu, Yan and Shi, Jianping and Lin, Dahua},
booktitle={Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision},
# Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds
## Abstract
> [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09664)
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Current 3D object detection methods are heavily influenced by 2D detectors. In order to leverage architectures in 2D detectors, they often convert 3D point clouds to regular grids (i.e., to voxel grids or to bird's eye view images), or rely on detection in 2D images to propose 3D boxes. Few works have attempted to directly detect objects in point clouds. In this work, we return to first principles to construct a 3D detection pipeline for point cloud data and as generic as possible. However, due to the sparse nature of the data -- samples from 2D manifolds in 3D space -- we face a major challenge when directly predicting bounding box parameters from scene points: a 3D object centroid can be far from any surface point thus hard to regress accurately in one step. To address the challenge, we propose VoteNet, an end-to-end 3D object detection network based on a synergy of deep point set networks and Hough voting. Our model achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection on two large datasets of real 3D scans, ScanNet and SUN RGB-D with a simple design, compact model size and high efficiency. Remarkably, VoteNet outperforms previous methods by using purely geometric information without relying on color images.
## Abstract
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Current 3D object detection methods are heavily influenced by 2D detectors. In order to leverage architectures in 2D detectors, they often convert 3D point clouds to regular grids (i.e., to voxel grids or to bird's eye view images), or rely on detection in 2D images to propose 3D boxes. Few works have attempted to directly detect objects in point clouds. In this work, we return to first principles to construct a 3D detection pipeline for point cloud data and as generic as possible. However, due to the sparse nature of the data -- samples from 2D manifolds in 3D space -- we face a major challenge when directly predicting bounding box parameters from scene points: a 3D object centroid can be far from any surface point thus hard to regress accurately in one step. To address the challenge, we propose VoteNet, an end-to-end 3D object detection network based on a synergy of deep point set networks and Hough voting. Our model achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection on two large datasets of real 3D scans, ScanNet and SUN RGB-D with a simple design, compact model size and high efficiency. Remarkably, VoteNet outperforms previous methods by using purely geometric information without relying on color images.
For now, we only support calculating IoU loss for axis-aligned bounding boxes since the CUDA op of general 3D IoU calculation does not implement the backward method. Therefore, IoU loss can only be used for ScanNet dataset for now.
## Citation
```latex
@inproceedings{qi2019deep,
author = {Qi, Charles R and Litany, Or and He, Kaiming and Guibas, Leonidas J},
title = {Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision},