# On the Robustness of 3D Object Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Robustness in Object Detection: Autonomous Driving when Winter is Coming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07484/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00678/) (2021)
- [Pillar-based Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10323/) (2020)
- [MLCVNet: Multi-Level Context VoteNet for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05679/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition Against Common Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12296/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking and Analyzing Point Cloud Classification under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03377/) (2022)
- [Robustness of Object Detectors in Degrading Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08795/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17597/) (2023)
- [Three Pillars improving Vision Foundation Model Distillation for Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17504/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Robustness of 3D Object Detection with Bird's-Eye-View Representations in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17297/) (2023)
- [A Modular System for Enhanced Robustness of Multimedia Understanding Networks via Deep Parametric Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18402/) (2024)
- [SARFusion: Scene-Aware Routing Fusion for Robust Camera-LiDAR 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29235/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, significant progress has been achieved for 3D object detection on point clouds thanks to the advances in 3D data collection and deep learning techniques. Nevertheless, 3D scenes exhibit a lot of variations and are prone to sensor inaccuracies as well as information loss during pre-processing. Thus, it is crucial to design techniques that are robust against these variations. This requires a detailed analysis and understanding of the effect of such variations. This work aims to analyze and benchmark popular point-based 3D object detectors against several data corruptions. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the robustness of point-based 3D object detectors. To this end, we design and evaluate corruptions that involve data addition, reduction, and alteration. We further study the robustness of different modules against local and global variations. Our experimental results reveal several intriguing findings. For instance, we show that methods that integrate Transformers at a patch or object level lead to increased robustness, compared to using Transformers at the point level.