# FastPillars: A Deployment-friendly Pillar-based 3D Detector

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02367/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [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)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [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)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00853/) (2015)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (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)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (2019)
- [Class-balanced Grouping and Sampling for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09492/) (2019)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17898/) (2026)
- [LiDAR-PTQ: Post-Training Quantization for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15865/) (2024)
- [INTENT: Invariance and Discrimination-aware Noise Mitigation for Robust Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18051/) (2026)
- [HABIT: Chrono-Synergia Robust Progressive Learning Framework for Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18037/) (2026)
- [ConeSep: Cone-based Robust Noise-Unlearning Compositional Network for Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20358/) (2026)
- [Information Entropy Guided Height-aware Histogram for Quantization-friendly Pillar Feature Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18734/) (2024)
- [MUFASA: Multi-View Fusion and Adaptation Network with Spatial Awareness for Radar Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00565/) (2024)
- [PillarNeSt: Embracing Backbone Scaling and Pretraining for Pillar-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17770/) (2023)
- [P2P: Part-to-Part Motion Cues Guide a Strong Tracking Framework for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05238/) (2024)
- [MVCTrack: Boosting 3D Point Cloud Tracking via Multimodal-Guided Virtual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02734/) (2024)
- [Hy-Facial: Hybrid Feature Extraction by Dimensionality Reduction Methods for Enhanced Facial Expression Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26614/) (2025)
- [CompTrack: Information Bottleneck-Guided Low-Rank Dynamic Token Compression for Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15580/) (2025)
- [FocusTrack: One-Stage Focus-and-Suppress Framework for 3D Point Cloud Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24133/) (2026)
- [A GEN AI Framework for Medical Note Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01841/) (2024)
- [GSRender: Deduplicated Occupancy Prediction via Weakly Supervised 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14579/) (2024)
- [FusionViT: Hierarchical 3D Object Detection via LiDAR-Camera Vision Transformer Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03620/) (2023)
- [Rethinking LoRA for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning in Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19926/) (2026)
- [Beyond Frame-wise Tracking: A Trajectory-based Paradigm for Efficient Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11453/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Backbone Design for Lightweight 3D Object Detection in LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00744/) (2025)
- [FAST: A Synergistic Framework of Attention and State-space Models for Spatiotemporal Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13453/) (2026)
- [Same Question, Different Answer? Measuring and Mitigating Prompt Privilege for Equitable AI Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08942/) (2026)
- [PillarTrack:Boosting Pillar Representation for Transformer-based 3D Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07495/) (2024)
- [LiFT: Lightweight, FPGA-tailored 3D object detection based on LiDAR data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11159/) (2025)
- [TFTrack: A Template-Free Framework for Efficient 3D Point Cloud Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07738/) (2026)
- [LiDAttack: Robust Black-box Attack on LiDAR-based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01889/) (2024)
- [Progressive Bird's Eye View Perception for Safety-Critical Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07560/) (2025)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Personalized LLM Impressions for Streamlined Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15845/) (2025)
- [Power of Cooperative Supervision: Multiple Teachers Framework for Enhanced 3D Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20720/) (2024)
- [RegTrack: Simplicity Beneath Complexity in Robust Multi-Modal 3D Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00618/) (2024)
- [PDM-SSD: Single-Stage Three-Dimensional Object Detector With Point Dilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07822/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The deployment of 3D detectors strikes one of the major challenges in real-world self-driving scenarios. Existing BEV-based (i.e., Bird Eye View) detectors favor sparse convolutions (known as SPConv) to speed up training and inference, which puts a hard barrier for deployment, especially for on-device applications. In this paper, to tackle the challenge of efficient 3D object detection from an industry perspective, we devise a deployment-friendly pillar-based 3D detector, termed FastPillars. First, we introduce a novel lightweight Max-and-Attention Pillar Encoding (MAPE) module specially for enhancing small 3D objects. Second, we propose a simple yet effective principle for designing a backbone in pillar-based 3D detection. We construct FastPillars based on these designs, achieving high performance and low latency without SPConv. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FastPillars for on-device 3D detection regarding both performance and speed. Specifically, FastPillars delivers state-of-the-art accuracy on Waymo Open Dataset with 1.8X speed up and 3.8 mAPH/L2 improvement over CenterPoint (SPConv-based). Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/StiphyJay/FastPillars.