# Investigating Attention Mechanism in 3D Point Cloud Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.00620 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00620/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Visual Attention Methods in Deep Learning: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07756/) (2022)
- [PU-Transformer: Point Cloud Upsampling Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12242/) (2021)
- [Transformers in 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07417/) (2022)
- [PartGlot: Learning Shape Part Segmentation from Language Reference Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06390/) (2021)
- [MUFASA: Multi-View Fusion and Adaptation Network with Spatial Awareness for Radar Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00565/) (2024)
- [PointCaM: Cut-and-Mix for Open-Set Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02011/) (2022)
- [Energy-Based Residual Latent Transport for Unsupervised Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06820/) (2022)
- [Graph Structure from Point Clouds: Geometric Attention is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16662/) (2023)
- [KGpose: Keypoint-Graph Driven End-to-End Multi-Object 6D Pose Estimation via Point-Wise Pose Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08909/) (2024)
- [Point upsampling networks for single-photon sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12986/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection in three-dimensional (3D) space attracts much interest from academia and industry since it is an essential task in AI-driven applications such as robotics, autonomous driving, and augmented reality. As the basic format of 3D data, the point cloud can provide detailed geometric information about the objects in the original 3D space. However, due to 3D data's sparsity and unorderedness, specially designed networks and modules are needed to process this type of data. Attention mechanism has achieved impressive performance in diverse computer vision tasks; however, it is unclear how attention modules would affect the performance of 3D point cloud object detection and what sort of attention modules could fit with the inherent properties of 3D data. This work investigates the role of the attention mechanism in 3D point cloud object detection and provides insights into the potential of different attention modules. To achieve that, we comprehensively investigate classical 2D attentions, novel 3D attentions, including the latest point cloud transformers on SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2 datasets. Based on the detailed experiments and analysis, we conclude the effects of different attention modules. This paper is expected to serve as a reference source for benefiting attention-embedded 3D point cloud object detection. The code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/ShiQiu0419/attentions_in_3D_detection.