# StarNet: Targeted Computation for Object Detection in Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.11069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [Offboard 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05073/) (2021)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [LiDAR R-CNN: An Efficient and Universal 3D Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15297/) (2021)
- [RSN: Range Sparse Net for Efficient, Accurate LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13365/) (2021)
- [Improving 3D Object Detection with Channel-wise Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10723/) (2021)
- [PillarNet: Real-Time and High-Performance Pillar-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07403/) (2022)
- [CenterFormer: Center-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05588/) (2022)
- [SWFormer: Sparse Window Transformer for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07372/) (2022)
- [AFDetV2: Rethinking the Necessity of the Second Stage for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09205/) (2021)
- [Pyramid R-CNN: Towards Better Performance and Adaptability for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02499/) (2021)
- [M3DeTR: Multi-representation, Multi-scale, Mutual-relation 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11896/) (2021)
- [3D-MAN: 3D Multi-frame Attention Network for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16054/) (2021)
- [MPPNet: Multi-Frame Feature Intertwining with Proxy Points for 3D Temporal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05979/) (2022)
- [Scalable Scene Flow from Point Clouds in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01306/) (2021)
- [VISTA: Boosting 3D Object Detection via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09704/) (2022)
- [4D-Net for Learned Multi-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01066/) (2021)
- [To the Point: Efficient 3D Object Detection in the Range Image with Graph Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13381/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-labeling for Scalable 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02093/) (2021)
- [Advancements in Point Cloud Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12113/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19812/) (2023)
- [Revisiting 3D Object Detection From an Egocentric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07787/) (2021)
- [MSF: Motion-guided Sequential Fusion for Efficient 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08316/) (2023)
- [itKD: Interchange Transfer-based Knowledge Distillation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15531/) (2022)
- [INT: Towards Infinite-frames 3D Detection with An Efficient Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15215/) (2022)
- [SA-Det3D: Self-Attention Based Context-Aware 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02672/) (2021)
- [MoDAR: Using Motion Forecasting for 3D Object Detection in Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03206/) (2023)
- [ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00912/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting objects from LiDAR point clouds is an important component of self-driving car technology as LiDAR provides high resolution spatial information. Previous work on point-cloud 3D object detection has re-purposed convolutional approaches from traditional camera imagery. In this work, we present an object detection system called StarNet designed specifically to take advantage of the sparse and 3D nature of point cloud data. StarNet is entirely point-based, uses no global information, has data dependent anchors, and uses sampling instead of learned region proposals. We demonstrate how this design leads to competitive or superior performance on the large Waymo Open Dataset and the KITTI detection dataset, as compared to convolutional baselines. In particular, we show how our detector can outperform a competitive baseline on Pedestrian detection on the Waymo Open Dataset by more than 7 absolute mAP while being more computationally efficient. We show how our redesign---namely using only local information and using sampling instead of learned proposals---leads to a significantly more flexible and adaptable system: we demonstrate how we can vary the computational cost of a single trained StarNet without retraining, and how we can target proposals towards areas of interest with priors and heuristics. Finally, we show how our design allows for incorporating temporal context by using detections from previous frames to target computation of the detector, which leads to further improvements in performance without additional computational cost.