# Multi-Echo LiDAR for 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.11470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11470/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [Deep Continuous Fusion for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10992/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12397/) (2020)
- [3D-CVF: Generating Joint Camera and LiDAR Features Using Cross-View Spatial Feature Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12636/) (2020)
- [EPNet: Enhancing Point Features with Image Semantics for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08856/) (2020)
- [CLOCs: Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00784/) (2020)
- [Frustum ConvNet: Sliding Frustums to Aggregate Local Point-Wise Features for Amodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01864/) (2019)
- [ImVoteNet: Boosting 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds with Image Votes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10692/) (2020)
- [HDNET: Exploiting HD Maps for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11704/) (2020)
- [Deep Generative Modeling of LiDAR Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01180/) (2018)
- [Cross-Modality 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10436/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DualCross: Cross-Modality Cross-Domain Adaptation for Monocular BEV Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03724/) (2023)
- [PRAM-R: A Perception-Reasoning-Action-Memory Framework with LLM-Guided Modality Routing for Adaptive Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04222/) (2026)
- [LiDAR for Crowd Management: Applications, Benefits, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27663/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LiDAR sensors can be used to obtain a wide range of measurement signals other than a simple 3D point cloud, and those signals can be leveraged to improve perception tasks like 3D object detection. A single laser pulse can be partially reflected by multiple objects along its path, resulting in multiple measurements called echoes. Multi-echo measurement can provide information about object contours and semi-transparent surfaces which can be used to better identify and locate objects. LiDAR can also measure surface reflectance (intensity of laser pulse return), as well as ambient light of the scene (sunlight reflected by objects). These signals are already available in commercial LiDAR devices but have not been used in most LiDAR-based detection models. We present a 3D object detection model which leverages the full spectrum of measurement signals provided by LiDAR. First, we propose a multi-signal fusion (MSF) module to combine (1) the reflectance and ambient features extracted with a 2D CNN, and (2) point cloud features extracted using a 3D graph neural network (GNN). Second, we propose a multi-echo aggregation (MEA) module to combine the information encoded in different set of echo points. Compared with traditional single echo point cloud methods, our proposed Multi-Signal LiDAR Detector (MSLiD) extracts richer context information from a wider range of sensing measurements and achieves more accurate 3D object detection. Experiments show that by incorporating the multi-modality of LiDAR, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 9.1%.