# PARTNER: Level up the Polar Representation for LiDAR 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03982 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03982/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [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)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10471/) (2019)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [One Million Scenes for Autonomous Driving: ONCE Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11037/) (2021)
- [Embracing Single Stride 3D Object Detector with Sparse Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06375/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [Understanding The Robustness in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12451/) (2022)
- [RangeDet:In Defense of Range View for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10039/) (2021)
- [Pillar-based Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10323/) (2020)
- [Voxel Set Transformer: A Set-to-Set Approach to 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10314/) (2022)
- [CenterFormer: Center-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05588/) (2022)
- [SWFormer: Sparse Window Transformer for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07372/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [RadarOcc: Robust 3D Occupancy Prediction with 4D Imaging Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14014/) (2024)
- [PolarBEVDet: Exploring Polar Representation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection in Bird's-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16200/) (2024)
- [PVP: Polar Representation Boost for 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07616/) (2024)
- [Towards Streaming LiDAR Object Detection with Point Clouds as Egocentric Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06944/) (2025)
- [AquaBEV: Monocular Underwater BEV Occupancy with 3D Sonar Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04411/) (2026)
- [PolarRec: Radio Interferometric Data Reconstruction with Polar Coordinate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14610/) (2023)
- [Targetless 6DoF Calibration of LiDAR and 2D Scanning Radar Based on Cylindrical Occupancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17002/) (2025)
- [Geometry-Guided Self-Supervision for Ultra-Fine-Grained Recognition with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19345/) (2026)
- [Geometry-Aware Fisheye-LiDAR Fusion for Robust 3D Object Detection in Low-Overlap Setups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08844/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, polar-based representation has shown promising properties in perceptual tasks. In addition to Cartesian-based approaches, which separate point clouds unevenly, representing point clouds as polar grids has been recognized as an alternative due to (1) its advantage in robust performance under different resolutions and (2) its superiority in streaming-based approaches. However, state-of-the-art polar-based detection methods inevitably suffer from the feature distortion problem because of the non-uniform division of polar representation, resulting in a non-negligible performance gap compared to Cartesian-based approaches. To tackle this issue, we present PARTNER, a novel 3D object detector in the polar coordinate. PARTNER alleviates the dilemma of feature distortion with global representation re-alignment and facilitates the regression by introducing instance-level geometric information into the detection head. Extensive experiments show overwhelming advantages in streaming-based detection and different resolutions. Furthermore, our method outperforms the previous polar-based works with remarkable margins of 3.68% and 9.15% on Waymo and ONCE validation set, thus achieving competitive results over the state-of-the-art methods.