# FCAF3D: Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection
> [FCAF3D: Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00322)
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## Abstract
Recently, promising applications in robotics and augmented reality have attracted considerable attention to 3D object detection from point clouds. In this paper, we present FCAF3D --- a first-in-class fully convolutional anchor-free indoor 3D object detection method. It is a simple yet effective method that uses a voxel representation of a point cloud and processes voxels with sparse convolutions. FCAF3D can handle large-scale scenes with minimal runtime through a single fully convolutional feed-forward pass. Existing 3D object detection methods make prior assumptions on the geometry of objects, and we argue that it limits their generalization ability. To eliminate prior assumptions, we propose a novel parametrization of oriented bounding boxes that allows obtaining better results in a purely data-driven way. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results in terms of mAP@0.5 on ScanNet V2 (+4.5), SUN RGB-D (+3.5), and S3DIS (+20.5) datasets.
