# Improving 3D Object Detection with Channel-wise Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 108 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (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)
- [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)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (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 Object Detection with Pointformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11409/) (2020)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [Bottom-up Object Detection by Grouping Extreme and Center Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08043/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 108)

- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [Not All Points Are Equal: Learning Highly Efficient Point-based Detectors for 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11139/) (2022)
- [Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17597/) (2023)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [Voxel Set Transformer: A Set-to-Set Approach to 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10314/) (2022)
- [CenterFormer: Center-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05588/) (2022)
- [AFDetV2: Rethinking the Necessity of the Second Stage for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09205/) (2021)
- [SparseFusion: Fusing Multi-Modal Sparse Representations for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14340/) (2023)
- [Sparse Fuse Dense: Towards High Quality 3D Detection with Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09780/) (2022)
- [Virtual Sparse Convolution for Multimodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02314/) (2023)
- [LoGoNet: Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection with Local-to-Global Cross-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03595/) (2023)
- [LidarMultiNet: Towards a Unified Multi-Task Network for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09385/) (2022)
- [Point Density-Aware Voxels for LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05662/) (2022)
- [MPPNet: Multi-Frame Feature Intertwining with Proxy Points for 3D Temporal Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05979/) (2022)
- [GD-MAE: Generative Decoder for MAE Pre-training on LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03010/) (2022)
- [Transformation-Equivariant 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11962/) (2022)
- [VISTA: Boosting 3D Object Detection via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09704/) (2022)
- [Graph R-CNN: Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection with Semantic-Decorated Local Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03624/) (2022)
- [GraphAlign: Enhancing Accurate Feature Alignment by Graph matching for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08261/) (2023)
- [CAT-Det: Contrastively Augmented Transformer for Multi-modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00325/) (2022)
- [OcTr: Octree-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12621/) (2023)
- [Transformers in 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07417/) (2022)
- [DetZero: Rethinking Offboard 3D Object Detection with Long-term Sequential Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06023/) (2023)
- [Densely Constrained Depth Estimator for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10047/) (2022)
- [Uni3DETR: Unified 3D Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05699/) (2023)
- [Homogeneous Multi-modal Feature Fusion and Interaction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09615/) (2022)
- [SparseLIF: High-Performance Sparse LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07284/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Though 3D object detection from point clouds has achieved rapid progress in recent years, the lack of flexible and high-performance proposal refinement remains a great hurdle for existing state-of-the-art two-stage detectors. Previous works on refining 3D proposals have relied on human-designed components such as keypoints sampling, set abstraction and multi-scale feature fusion to produce powerful 3D object representations. Such methods, however, have limited ability to capture rich contextual dependencies among points. In this paper, we leverage the high-quality region proposal network and a Channel-wise Transformer architecture to constitute our two-stage 3D object detection framework (CT3D) with minimal hand-crafted design. The proposed CT3D simultaneously performs proposal-aware embedding and channel-wise context aggregation for the point features within each proposal. Specifically, CT3D uses proposal's keypoints for spatial contextual modelling and learns attention propagation in the encoding module, mapping the proposal to point embeddings. Next, a new channel-wise decoding module enriches the query-key interaction via channel-wise re-weighting to effectively merge multi-level contexts, which contributes to more accurate object predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CT3D method has superior performance and excellent scalability. Remarkably, CT3D achieves the AP of 81.77% in the moderate car category on the KITTI test 3D detection benchmark, outperforms state-of-the-art 3D detectors.