# CALICO: Self-Supervised Camera-LiDAR Contrastive Pre-training for BEV Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00349 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00349/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [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)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Learn To be Efficient: Build Structured Sparsity in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06126/) (2024)
- [VPA: Fully Test-Time Visual Prompt Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15251/) (2023)
- [Shelf-Supervised Cross-Modal Pre-Training for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10115/) (2024)
- [Panoptic Perception for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15388/) (2024)
- [S3PT: Scene Semantics and Structure Guided Clustering to Boost Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23085/) (2024)
- [Cohere3D: Exploiting Temporal Coherence for Unsupervised Representation Learning of Vision-based Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15583/) (2024)
- [Learning Shared RGB-D Fields: Unified Self-supervised Pre-training for Label-efficient LiDAR-Camera 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17942/) (2024)
- [CLAP: Unsupervised 3D Representation Learning for Fusion 3D Perception via Curvature Sampling and Prototype Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03059/) (2024)
- [Progressive Bird's Eye View Perception for Safety-Critical Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07560/) (2025)
- [Image-Guided Semantic Pseudo-LiDAR Point Generation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14985/) (2024)
- [Finetuning Pre-trained Model with Limited Data for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection by Bridging Domain Gaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01319/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-training with Combined Datasets for 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12709/) (2025)
- [RayD3D: Distilling Depth Knowledge Along the Ray for Robust Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07493/) (2026)
- [OctoSense: Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Robot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27317/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perception is crucial in the realm of autonomous driving systems, where bird's eye view (BEV)-based architectures have recently reached state-of-the-art performance. The desirability of self-supervised representation learning stems from the expensive and laborious process of annotating 2D and 3D data. Although previous research has investigated pretraining methods for both LiDAR and camera-based 3D object detection, a unified pretraining framework for multimodal BEV perception is missing. In this study, we introduce CALICO, a novel framework that applies contrastive objectives to both LiDAR and camera backbones. Specifically, CALICO incorporates two stages: point-region contrast (PRC) and region-aware distillation (RAD). PRC better balances the region- and scene-level representation learning on the LiDAR modality and offers significant performance improvement compared to existing methods. RAD effectively achieves contrastive distillation on our self-trained teacher model. CALICO's efficacy is substantiated by extensive evaluations on 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks, where it delivers significant performance improvements. Notably, CALICO outperforms the baseline method by 10.5% and 8.6% on NDS and mAP. Moreover, CALICO boosts the robustness of multimodal 3D object detection against adversarial attacks and corruption. Additionally, our framework can be tailored to different backbones and heads, positioning it as a promising approach for multimodal BEV perception.