# HeightFormer: Explicit Height Modeling without Extra Data for Camera-only 3D Object Detection in Bird's Eye View

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13510 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13510/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [PETRv2: A Unified Framework for 3D Perception from Multi-Camera Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01256/) (2022)
- [Class-balanced Grouping and Sampling for Point Cloud 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09492/) (2019)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [Is Pseudo-Lidar needed for Monocular 3D Object detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06417/) (2021)
- [Orthographic Feature Transform for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08188/) (2018)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14160/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR++: Accurate Depth for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06310/) (2019)
- [DeepStereo: Learning to Predict New Views from the World's Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06825/) (2015)
- [Objects are Different: Flexible Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02323/) (2021)
- [Time Will Tell: New Outlooks and A Baseline for Temporal Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02443/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [OccSora: 4D Occupancy Generation Models as World Simulators for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20337/) (2024)
- [Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14158/) (2024)
- [STCOcc: Sparse Spatial-Temporal Cascade Renovation for 3D Occupancy and Scene Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19749/) (2025)
- [BEVSpread: Spread Voxel Pooling for Bird's-Eye-View Representation in Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08785/) (2024)
- [DualBEV: Unifying Dual View Transformation with Probabilistic Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05402/) (2024)
- [FlatFusion: Delving into Details of Sparse Transformer-based Camera-LiDAR Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06832/) (2024)
- [Anchor3DLane++: 3D Lane Detection via Sample-Adaptive Sparse 3D Anchor Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16889/) (2024)
- [Spatial Retrieval Augmented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06865/) (2025)
- [Learning High-resolution Vector Representation from Multi-Camera Images for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15354/) (2024)
- [HeightLane: BEV Heightmap guided 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08270/) (2024)
- [HeightMapNet: Explicit Height Modeling for End-to-End HD Map Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01408/) (2024)
- [HV-BEV: Decoupling Horizontal and Vertical Feature Sampling for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18884/) (2024)
- [DB3D-L: Depth-aware BEV Feature Transformation for Accurate 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13266/) (2025)
- [OcRFDet: Object-Centric Radiance Fields for Multi-View 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23565/) (2025)
- [SC-Lane: Slope-aware and Consistent Road Height Estimation Framework for 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10411/) (2025)
- [MAESTRO: Task-Relevant Optimization via Adaptive Feature Enhancement and Suppression for Multi-task 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17462/) (2025)
- [Multi-Modal Decouple and Recouple Network for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07486/) (2026)
- [HSDF-Lane: Height-Aligned Signed Distance Field with Semantic Lane Prior for 3D Lane Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31172/) (2026)
- [FlashBEV: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact BEV Transformation with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10071/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-based Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation is an emerging perception formulation for autonomous driving. The core challenge is to construct BEV space with multi-camera features, which is a one-to-many ill-posed problem. Diving into all previous BEV representation generation methods, we found that most of them fall into two types: modeling depths in image views or modeling heights in the BEV space, mostly in an implicit way. In this work, we propose to explicitly model heights in the BEV space, which needs no extra data like LiDAR and can fit arbitrary camera rigs and types compared to modeling depths. Theoretically, we give proof of the equivalence between height-based methods and depth-based methods. Considering the equivalence and some advantages of modeling heights, we propose HeightFormer, which models heights and uncertainties in a self-recursive way. Without any extra data, the proposed HeightFormer could estimate heights in BEV accurately. Benchmark results show that the performance of HeightFormer achieves SOTA compared with those camera-only methods.