A LiDAR–Camera Fusion 3D Object Detection Algorithm

Abstract

3D object detection with LiDAR and camera fusion has always been a challenge for autonomous driving. This work proposes a deep neural network (namely FuDNN) for LiDAR–camera fusion 3D object detection. Firstly, a 2D backbone is designed to extract features from camera images. Secondly, an attention-based fusion sub-network is designed to fuse the features extracted by the 2D backbone and the features extracted from 3D LiDAR point clouds by PointNet++. Besides, the FuDNN, which uses the RPN and the refinement work of PointRCNN to obtain 3D box predictions, was tested on the public KITTI dataset. Experiments on the KITTI validation set show that the proposed FuDNN achieves AP values of 92.48, 82.90, and 80.51 at easy, moderate, and hard difficulty levels for car detection. The proposed FuDNN improves the performance of LiDAR–camera fusion 3D object detection in the car category of the public KITTI dataset.