A Lightweight Model for 3D Point Cloud Object Detection

Abstract

With the rapid development of deep learning, more and more complex models are applied to 3D point cloud object detection to improve accuracy. In general, the more complex the model, the better the performance and the greater the computational resource consumption it has. However, complex models are incompatible for deployment on edge devices with restricted memory, so accurate and efficient 3D point cloud object detection processing is necessary. Recently, a lightweight model design has been proposed as one type of effective model compression that aims to design more efficient network computing methods. In this paper, a lightweight 3D point cloud object detection network architecture is proposed. The core innovation of the proposal consists of a lightweight 3D sparse convolution layer module (LW-Sconv module) and knowledge distillation loss. Firstly, in the LW-Sconv module, factorized convolution and group convolution are applied to the standard 3D sparse convolution layer. As the basic component of the lightweight 3D point cloud object detection network proposed in this paper, the LW-Sconv module greatly reduces the complexity of the network. Then, the knowledge distillation loss is used to guide the training of the lightweight network proposed in this paper to further improve the detection accuracy. Finally, extensive experiments are performed to verify the algorithm proposed in this paper. Compared with the baseline model, the proposed model can reduce the FLOPs and parameters by 3.7 times and 7.9 times, respectively. The lightweight model trained with knowledge distillation loss achieves comparable accuracy to the baseline. Experiments show that the proposed method greatly reduces the model complexity while ensuring detection accuracy.