Efficient graph attentional network for 3D object detection from Frustum-based LiDAR point clouds

Abstract

LiDAR-based 3D object detection is important for autonomous driving scene perception, but point clouds produced by LiDAR are irregular and unstructured in nature, and cannot be adopted by the conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Recently, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) has been proved as an ideal way to handle non-Euclidean structure data, as well as for point cloud processing. However, GCN involves massive computation for searching adjacent nodes, and the heavy computational cost limits its applications in processing large-scale LiDAR point cloud in autonomous driving. In this work, we adopt a frustum-based point cloud-image fusion scheme to reduce the amount of LiDAR point clouds, thus making the GCN-based large-scale LiDAR point clouds feature learning feasible. On this basis, we propose an efficient graph attentional network to accomplish the goal of 3D object detection in autonomous driving, which can learn features from raw LiDAR point cloud directly without any conversions. We evaluate the model on the public KITTI benchmark dataset, the 3D detection mAP is 63.72% on KITTI Cars, Pedestrian and Cyclists, and the inference speed achieves 7.9 fps on a single GPU, which is faster than other methods of the same type.