BEV-IO: Enhancing Bird's-Eye-View 3D Detection with Instance Occupancy

A popular approach for constructing bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation in 3D detection is to lift 2D image features onto the viewing frustum space based on explicitly predicted depth distribution. However, depth distribution can only characterize the 3D geometry of visible object surfaces but fails to capture their internal space and overall geometric structure, leading to sparse and unsatisfactory 3D representations. To mitigate this issue, we present BEV-IO, a new 3D detection paradigm to enhance BEV representation with instance occupancy information. At the core of our method is the newly-designed instance occupancy prediction (IOP) module, which aims to infer point-level occupancy status for each instance in the frustum space. To ensure training efficiency while maintaining representational flexibility, it is trained using the combination of both explicit and implicit supervision. With the predicted occupancy, we further design a geometry-aware feature propagation mechanism (GFP), which performs self-attention based on occupancy distribution along each ray in frustum and is able to enforce instance-level feature consistency. By integrating the IOP module with GFP mechanism, our BEV-IO detector is able to render highly informative 3D scene structures with more comprehensive BEV representations. Experimental results demonstrate that BEV-IO can outperform state-of-the-art methods while only adding a negligible increase in parameters (0.2%) and computational overhead (0.24%in GFLOPs).