# Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03105 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03105/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [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)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05625/) (2022)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [PETRv2: A Unified Framework for 3D Perception from Multi-Camera Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01256/) (2022)
- [BEVDet4D: Exploit Temporal Cues in Multi-camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17054/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [Is Pseudo-Lidar needed for Monocular 3D Object detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06417/) (2021)
- [Trajectory-guided Control Prediction for End-to-end Autonomous Driving: A Simple yet Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08129/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Pretraining of 3D Features on any Point-Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02691/) (2021)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)
- [BEVerse: Unified Perception and Prediction in Birds-Eye-View for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09743/) (2022)
- [Distilling Object Detectors with Fine-grained Feature Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03609/) (2019)
- [Time Will Tell: New Outlooks and A Baseline for Temporal Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02443/) (2022)
- [Cross Modal Distillation for Supervision Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00448/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [OmniQuant: Omnidirectionally Calibrated Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13137/) (2023)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Scene Graph for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04758/) (2023)
- [Fully Sparse 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17118/) (2023)
- [Open-sourced Data Ecosystem in Autonomous Driving: the Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03408/) (2023)
- [OccFeat: Self-supervised Occupancy Feature Prediction for Pretraining BEV Segmentation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14027/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Vision-Centric Multi-Modal Expertise for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15670/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving Perception: A Survey Through Core Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08302/) (2025)
- [Twin Trigger Generative Networks for Backdoor Attacks against Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15439/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.