# PSA-Det3D: Pillar Set Abstraction for 3D object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10983 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10983/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Point-GNN: Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection in a Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01251/) (2020)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [3D Object Detection with Pointformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11409/) (2020)
- [Embracing Single Stride 3D Object Detector with Sparse Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06375/) (2021)
- [Pillar-based Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10323/) (2020)
- [Not All Points Are Equal: Learning Highly Efficient Point-based Detectors for 3D LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11139/) (2022)
- [Frustum ConvNet: Sliding Frustums to Aggregate Local Point-Wise Features for Amodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01864/) (2019)
- [Fast Point R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02990/) (2019)
- [TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05163/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for Image and Point Cloud Fusion in Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05224/) (2020)
- [Object as Hotspots: An Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection Approach via Firing of Hotspots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12791/) (2019)
- [Pyramid R-CNN: Towards Better Performance and Adaptability for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02499/) (2021)
- [M3DeTR: Multi-representation, Multi-scale, Mutual-relation 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11896/) (2021)
- [SASA: Semantics-Augmented Set Abstraction for Point-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01976/) (2022)
- [DBQ-SSD: Dynamic Ball Query for Efficient 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10909/) (2022)
- [BADet: Boundary-Aware 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10330/) (2021)
- [Accurate and Real-time 3D Pedestrian Detection Using an Efficient Attentive Pillar Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15458/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Simulation-Based Performance Evaluation of 3D Object Detection Methods with Deep Learning for a LiDAR Point Cloud Dataset in a SOTIF-related Use Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03548/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small object detection for 3D point cloud is a challenging problem because of two limitations: (1) Perceiving small objects is much more diffcult than normal objects due to the lack of valid points. (2) Small objects are easily blocked which breaks the shape of their meshes in 3D point cloud. In this paper, we propose a pillar set abstraction (PSA) and foreground point compensation (FPC) and design a point-based detection network, PSA-Det3D, to improve the detection performance for small object. The PSA embeds a pillar query operation on the basis of set abstraction (SA) to expand its receptive field of the network, which can aggregate point-wise features effectively. To locate more occluded objects, we persent a proposal generation layer consisting of a foreground point segmentation and a FPC module. Both the foreground points and the estimated centers are finally fused together to generate the detection result. The experiments on the KITTI 3D detection benchmark show that our proposed PSA-Det3D outperforms other algorithms with high accuracy for small object detection.