# 3D Cascade RCNN: High Quality Object Detection in Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.08248 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08248/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Commonsense Prototype for Outdoor Unsupervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16493/) (2024)
- [Extending Large Vision-Language Model for Diverse Interactive Tasks in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08725/) (2025)
- [Reflectance Prediction-based Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection in Compressed Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17442/) (2025)
- [DiffRef3D: A Diffusion-based Proposal Refinement Framework for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16349/) (2023)
- [InScope: A New Real-world 3D Infrastructure-side Collaborative Perception Dataset for Open Traffic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21581/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Robustness to Noise Corruption for Point Cloud Recognition via Spatial Sorting and Set-Mixing Aggregation Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10806/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal Decouple and Recouple Network for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07486/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress on 2D object detection has featured Cascade RCNN, which capitalizes on a sequence of cascade detectors to progressively improve proposal quality, towards high-quality object detection. However, there has not been evidence in support of building such cascade structures for 3D object detection, a challenging detection scenario with highly sparse LiDAR point clouds. In this work, we present a simple yet effective cascade architecture, named 3D Cascade RCNN, that allocates multiple detectors based on the voxelized point clouds in a cascade paradigm, pursuing higher quality 3D object detector progressively. Furthermore, we quantitatively define the sparsity level of the points within 3D bounding box of each object as the point completeness score, which is exploited as the task weight for each proposal to guide the learning of each stage detector. The spirit behind is to assign higher weights for high-quality proposals with relatively complete point distribution, while down-weight the proposals with extremely sparse points that often incur noise during training. This design of completeness-aware re-weighting elegantly upgrades the cascade paradigm to be better applicable for the sparse input data, without increasing any FLOP budgets. Through extensive experiments on both the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset, we validate the superiority of our proposed 3D Cascade RCNN, when comparing to state-of-the-art 3D object detection techniques. The source code is publicly available at urlhttps://github.com/caiqi/Cascasde-3D.