# MSF3DDETR: Multi-Sensor Fusion 3D Detection Transformer for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15316 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15316/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [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)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deep Continuous Fusion for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10992/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Virtual Point 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06881/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [InteractionNet: Joint Planning and Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03475/) (2023)
- [Group Equivariant BEV for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13390/) (2023)
- [HySafe-AI: Hybrid Safety Architectural Analysis Framework for AI Systems: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17118/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D object detection is a significant task for autonomous driving. Recently with the progress of vision transformers, the 2D object detection problem is being treated with the set-to-set loss. Inspired by these approaches on 2D object detection and an approach for multi-view 3D object detection DETR3D, we propose MSF3DDETR: Multi-Sensor Fusion 3D Detection Transformer architecture to fuse image and LiDAR features to improve the detection accuracy. Our end-to-end single-stage, anchor-free and NMS-free network takes in multi-view images and LiDAR point clouds and predicts 3D bounding boxes. Firstly, we link the object queries learnt from data to the image and LiDAR features using a novel MSF3DDETR cross-attention block. Secondly, the object queries interacts with each other in multi-head self-attention block. Finally, MSF3DDETR block is repeated for L number of times to refine the object queries. The MSF3DDETR network is trained end-to-end on the nuScenes dataset using Hungarian algorithm based bipartite matching and set-to-set loss inspired by DETR. We present both quantitative and qualitative results which are competitive to the state-of-the-art approaches.
