# DetZero: Rethinking Offboard 3D Object Detection with Long-term Sequential Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06023 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06023/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (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)
- [Point-GNN: Graph Neural Network for 3D Object Detection in a Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01251/) (2020)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [FlowNet3D: Learning Scene Flow in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01411/) (2018)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [Offboard 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05073/) (2021)
- [Pillar-based Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10323/) (2020)
- [Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17597/) (2023)
- [HPLFlowNet: Hierarchical Permutohedral Lattice FlowNet for Scene Flow Estimation on Large-scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05332/) (2019)
- [Improving 3D Object Detection with Channel-wise Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10723/) (2021)
- [CIA-SSD: Confident IoU-Aware Single-Stage Object Detector From Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03015/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [DriveArena: A Closed-loop Generative Simulation Platform for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00415/) (2024)
- [UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05573/) (2023)
- [Is Your LiDAR Placement Optimized for 3D Scene Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17009/) (2024)
- [DriveX: Omni Scene Modeling for Learning Generalizable World Knowledge in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19239/) (2025)
- [MCTrack: A Unified 3D Multi-Object Tracking Framework for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16149/) (2024)
- [TraF-Align: Trajectory-aware Feature Alignment for Asynchronous Multi-agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19391/) (2025)
- [MS3D++: Ensemble of Experts for Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05988/) (2023)
- [Offboard Occupancy Refinement with Hybrid Propagation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08504/) (2024)
- [MixSup: Mixed-grained Supervision for Label-efficient LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16305/) (2024)
- [SOAP: Cross-sensor Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection Using Stationary Object Aggregation Pseudo-labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04230/) (2024)
- [Offline Tracking with Object Permanence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01288/) (2023)
- [LabelFormer: Object Trajectory Refinement for Offboard Perception from LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01444/) (2023)
- [Towards Stable 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04305/) (2024)
- [Learning to Detect Objects from Multi-Agent LiDAR Scans without Manual Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08421/) (2025)
- [ZOPP: A Framework of Zero-shot Offboard Panoptic Perception for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05311/) (2024)
- [3D Multiple Object Tracking on Autonomous Driving: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15411/) (2023)
- [Unleashing the Potential of Mamba: Boosting a LiDAR 3D Sparse Detector by Using Cross-Model Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11018/) (2024)
- [Learning 3D Perception from Others' Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02646/) (2024)
- [Are Dense Labels Always Necessary for 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02818/) (2024)
- [Vision-Driven 2D Supervised Fine-Tuning Framework for Bird's Eye View Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05834/) (2024)
- [Learning better representations for crowded pedestrians in offboard LiDAR-camera 3D tracking-by-detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16029/) (2025)
- [Offline-Poly: A Polyhedral Framework For Offline 3D Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13772/) (2026)
- [FOMO-3D: Using Vision Foundation Models for Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08611/) (2026)
- [M^3Detection: Multi-Frame Multi-Level Feature Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection with Camera and 4D Imaging Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27166/) (2025)
- [GeoTeacher: Geometry-Guided Semi-Supervised 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23147/) (2025)
- [3D Object Visibility Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03681/) (2024)
- [Quantum Inverse Contextual Vision Transformers (Q-ICVT): A New Frontier in 3D Object Detection for AVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11207/) (2024)
- [From Binary to Semantic: Utilizing Large-Scale Binary Occupancy Data for 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13387/) (2025)
- [When the City Teaches the Car: Label-Free 3D Perception from Infrastructure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16742/) (2026)
- [MotionSync: Non-Causal Refinement of Causal Tracker for Label-Efficient 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29567/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing offboard 3D detectors always follow a modular pipeline design to take advantage of unlimited sequential point clouds. We have found that the full potential of offboard 3D detectors is not explored mainly due to two reasons: (1) the onboard multi-object tracker cannot generate sufficient complete object trajectories, and (2) the motion state of objects poses an inevitable challenge for the object-centric refining stage in leveraging the long-term temporal context representation. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel paradigm of offboard 3D object detection, named DetZero. Concretely, an offline tracker coupled with a multi-frame detector is proposed to focus on the completeness of generated object tracks. An attention-mechanism refining module is proposed to strengthen contextual information interaction across long-term sequential point clouds for object refining with decomposed regression methods. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset show our DetZero outperforms all state-of-the-art onboard and offboard 3D detection methods. Notably, DetZero ranks 1st place on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard with 85.15 mAPH (L2) detection performance. Further experiments validate the application of taking the place of human labels with such high-quality results. Our empirical study leads to rethinking conventions and interesting findings that can guide future research on offboard 3D object detection.