F-PVNet: Frustum-Level 3-D Object Detection on Point–Voxel Feature Representation for Autonomous Driving

Current 3-D object detection technology for autonomous driving usually cannot efficiently utilize local sensitive points. Meanwhile, contextual feature extracted from a object is not sufficient, which easily leads to deteriorated detection accuracy of the final object estimation. For the problems, a point–voxel-based 3-D dynamic object detection algorithm is proposed. First, local points are grouped with a camera frustum. Then, the global feature extracted by the submanifold 3-D voxel CNNs is aggregated into frustum key points. Second, a module of vector pool with feature aggregation is used to aggregate multiscale features of the point cloud. Moreover, the frustum raw feature and BEV feature are used for feature extension. Subsequently, the fine multiscale feature extracted from the point cloud is used as input to a subsequent fully convolutional network for final classification and continuous estimation of oriented 3-D boxes. The proposed method was compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms on the KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes data sets. Experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm was better in accuracy, robustness, and generalization capabilities in 3-D dynamic object detection. Experiments on a real scenario and extensive ablation studies also demonstrated that the proposed algorithm not only effectively controls computational cost but also achieved more efficient results in 3-D object detection.