# PillarNet: Real-Time and High-Performance Pillar-based 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07403/

## Key facts

- Cited by 99 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Class-balanced Grouping and Sampling for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09492/) (2019)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (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)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Offboard 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05073/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 99)

- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08739/) (2023)
- [Voxel Mamba: Group-Free State Space Models for Point Cloud based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10700/) (2024)
- [FocalFormer3D : Focusing on Hard Instance for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04556/) (2023)
- [GD-MAE: Generative Decoder for MAE Pre-training on LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03010/) (2022)
- [IS-Fusion: Instance-Scene Collaborative Fusion for Multimodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15241/) (2024)
- [SAFDNet: A Simple and Effective Network for Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05817/) (2024)
- [RangeLDM: Fast Realistic LiDAR Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10094/) (2024)
- [HEDNet: A Hierarchical Encoder-Decoder Network for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20234/) (2023)
- [FastPillars: A Deployment-friendly Pillar-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02367/) (2023)
- [BEVFusion4D: Learning LiDAR-Camera Fusion Under Bird's-Eye-View via Cross-Modality Guidance and Temporal Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17099/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Domain-Adaptive 3D Object Detection by Reliable, Diverse and Class-balanced Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07944/) (2023)
- [RadarDistill: Boosting Radar-based Object Detection Performance via Knowledge Distillation from LiDAR Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05061/) (2024)
- [MATE: Masked Autoencoders are Online 3D Test-Time Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11432/) (2022)
- [RCM-Fusion: Radar-Camera Multi-Level Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10249/) (2023)
- [RadarPillars: Efficient Object Detection from 4D Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05020/) (2024)
- [Perspective-Invariant 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17665/) (2025)
- [LitePT: Lighter Yet Stronger Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13689/) (2025)
- [SupFusion: Supervised LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07084/) (2023)
- [Information Entropy Guided Height-aware Histogram for Quantization-friendly Pillar Feature Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18734/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-CS Dataset: LiDAR Point Cloud Dataset with Cross-Sensors for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12515/) (2023)
- [KECOR: Kernel Coding Rate Maximization for Active 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07942/) (2023)
- [On Offline Evaluation of 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12779/) (2023)
- [ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00912/) (2024)
- [RCBEVDet++: Toward High-accuracy Radar-Camera Fusion 3D Perception Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04979/) (2024)
- [Radars for Autonomous Driving: A Review of Deep Learning Methods and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09304/) (2023)
- [PillarNeSt: Embracing Backbone Scaling and Pretraining for Pillar-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17770/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time and high-performance 3D object detection is of critical importance for autonomous driving. Recent top-performing 3D object detectors mainly rely on point-based or 3D voxel-based convolutions, which are both computationally inefficient for onboard deployment. In contrast, pillar-based methods use solely 2D convolutions, which consume less computation resources, but they lag far behind their voxel-based counterparts in detection accuracy. In this paper, by examining the primary performance gap between pillar- and voxel-based detectors, we develop a real-time and high-performance pillar-based detector, dubbed PillarNet.The proposed PillarNet consists of a powerful encoder network for effective pillar feature learning, a neck network for spatial-semantic feature fusion and the commonly used detect head. Using only 2D convolutions, PillarNet is flexible to an optional pillar size and compatible with classical 2D CNN backbones, such as VGGNet and ResNet. Additionally, PillarNet benefits from our designed orientation-decoupled IoU regression loss along with the IoU-aware prediction branch. Extensive experimental results on the large-scale nuScenes Dataset and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that the proposed PillarNet performs well over state-of-the-art 3D detectors in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/agent-sgs/PillarNet.