Enhanced 3D object detection for autonomous driving: A spatial-temporal alignment approach in Bird's Eye View scenarios

Abstract

This paper presents a novel 3D object detection algorithm designed for Bird's Eye View (BEV) scenarios, which significantly improves detection capabilities by integrating spatial and temporal features. The core of our approach is the spatial-temporal alignment module that efficiently processes information across different time steps and spatial locations, enhancing the precision and robustness of object detection. We employ a temporal self-attention mechanism to capture the motion information of objects over time, allowing the model to correlate features across various time steps for identifying and tracking moving objects. Additionally, a spatial cross-attention mechanism is utilized to focus on spatial features within regions of interest, promoting interactions between features extracted from camera views and BEV queries. Our method also implements temporal feature integration and multi-scale feature fusion to enhance detection stability and accuracy for fast-moving objects and to capture multi-scale context information, respectively. The model employs an enriched feature set post alignment for 3D bounding box prediction, ascertaining the position, dimensions, and orientation of objects. We conducted experiments on two public datasets for autonomous driving nuScenes and Waymo Open Dataset, demonstrating that our method outperforms previous BEVFormer and other state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and robustness. The paper concludes with potential future directions for optimizing the BEVFormer model's performance and exploring its application in broader scenarios and tasks.