# PointPillars Backbone Type Selection For Fast and Accurate LiDAR Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.15252 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15252/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Scaled-YOLOv4: Scaling Cross Stage Partial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08036/) (2020)
- [LaserNet: An Efficient Probabilistic 3D Object Detector for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08701/) (2019)
- [You Only Learn One Representation: Unified Network for Multiple Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04206/) (2021)
- [Sparse Fuse Dense: Towards High Quality 3D Detection with Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09780/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D object detection from LiDAR sensor data is an important topic in the context of autonomous cars and drones. In this paper, we present the results of experiments on the impact of backbone selection of a deep convolutional neural network on detection accuracy and computation speed. We chose the PointPillars network, which is characterised by a simple architecture, high speed, and modularity that allows for easy expansion. During the experiments, we paid particular attention to the change in detection efficiency (measured by the mAP metric) and the total number of multiply-addition operations needed to process one point cloud. We tested 10 different convolutional neural network architectures that are widely used in image-based detection problems. For a backbone like MobilenetV1, we obtained an almost 4x speedup at the cost of a 1.13% decrease in mAP. On the other hand, for CSPDarknet we got an acceleration of more than 1.5x at an increase in mAP of 0.33%. We have thus demonstrated that it is possible to significantly speed up a 3D object detector in LiDAR point clouds with a small decrease in detection efficiency. This result can be used when PointPillars or similar algorithms are implemented in embedded systems, including SoC FPGAs. The code is available at https://github.com/vision-agh/pointpillarsbackbone.