# Are Dense Labels Always Necessary for 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02818/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [3DSSD: Point-based 3D Single Stage Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10187/) (2020)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [Bilevel Programming for Hyperparameter Optimization and Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04910/) (2018)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [From Points to Parts: 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud with Part-aware and Part-aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03670/) (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)
- [Curriculum Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10382/) (2021)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [Embracing Single Stride 3D Object Detector with Sparse Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06375/) (2021)
- [Investigating Bi-Level Optimization for Learning and Vision from a Unified Perspective: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11517/) (2021)
- [Offboard 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05073/) (2021)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [SE-SSD: Self-Ensembling Single-Stage Object Detector From Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09804/) (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, 2 of 2)

- [Data augmentation with automated machine learning: approaches and performance comparison with classical data augmentation methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08352/) (2024)
- [Filling the Pareto-Optimal Front for Affordance Segmentation on Embedded Devices Using RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28293/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D object detection methods often require a large amount of 3D bounding box annotations for training. However, collecting such large-scale densely-supervised datasets is notoriously costly. To reduce the cumbersome data annotation process, we propose a novel sparsely-annotated framework, in which we just annotate one 3D object per scene. Such a sparse annotation strategy could significantly reduce the heavy annotation burden, while inexact and incomplete sparse supervision may severely deteriorate the detection performance. To address this issue, we develop the SS3D++ method that alternatively improves 3D detector training and confident fully-annotated scene generation in a unified learning scheme. Using sparse annotations as seeds, we progressively generate confident fully-annotated scenes based on designing a missing-annotated instance mining module and reliable background mining module. Our proposed method produces competitive results when compared with SOTA weakly-supervised methods using the same or even more annotation costs. Besides, compared with SOTA fully-supervised methods, we achieve on-par or even better performance on the KITTI dataset with about 5x less annotation cost, and 90% of their performance on the Waymo dataset with about 15x less annotation cost. The additional unlabeled training scenes could further boost the performance.