Object detection is important in many applications, such as autonomous driving. While 2D images lack depth information and are sensitive to environmental conditions, 3D point clouds can provide accurate depth information and a more descriptive environment. However, sparsity is always a challenge in single-frame point cloud object detection. This paper introduces a two-stage proposal-based feature fusion method for object detection using multiple frames. The proposed method, called proposal features fusion (PFF), utilizes a cosine-similarity approach to associate proposals from multiple frames and employs an attention weighted fusion (AWF) module to merge features from these proposals. It allows for feature fusion specific to individual objects and offers lower computational complexity while achieving higher precision. The experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an mAP of 46.7%, which is 1.3% higher than the state-of-the-art 3D object detection method.
Keywords: 3D object detection; autonomous driving; feature and data fusion; multiple frame point clouds.