Adaptive and azimuth-aware fusion network of multimodal local features for 3D object detection

Abstract

This paper focuses on the construction of strong local features and the effective fusion of image and LiDAR data for 3D object detection. We adopt different modalities of LiDAR data to generate rich features and present an adaptive and azimuth-aware network to aggregate local features from image, bird’s eye view maps and point cloud. Our network mainly consists of three subnetworks: ground plane estimation network, region proposal network and adaptive fusion network. The ground plane estimation network extracts features of point cloud and predicts the parameters of a plane which are used for generating abundant 3D anchors. The region proposal network generates features of image and bird’s eye view maps to output region proposals. To integrate heterogeneous image and point cloud features, the adaptive fusion network explicitly adjusts the intensity of multiple local features and achieves the orientation consistency between image and LiDAR data by introducing an azimuth-aware fusion module. Experiments are conducted on KITTI dataset and the results validate the advantages of our aggregation of multimodal local features and the adaptive fusion network.