# Detect Closer Surfaces that can be Seen: New Modeling and Evaluation in Cross-domain 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04061 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04061/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [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)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11319/) (2019)
- [A Robust Learning Approach to Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02361/) (2019)
- [ROAD: Reality Oriented Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11556/) (2017)
- [ST3D++: Denoised Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06682/) (2021)
- [LiDAR Distillation: Bridging the Beam-Induced Domain Gap for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14956/) (2022)
- [PillarNeXt: Rethinking Network Designs for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04925/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Adaptive Faster R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09372/) (2019)
- [Uni3D: A Unified Baseline for Multi-dataset 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06880/) (2023)
- [Density-Insensitive Unsupervised Domain Adaption on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09446/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Domain-Adaptive 3D Object Detection by Reliable, Diverse and Class-balanced Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07944/) (2023)
- [Bi3D: Bi-domain Active Learning for Cross-domain 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05886/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Perspective-Invariant 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17665/) (2025)
- [DVLO4D: Deep Visual-Lidar Odometry with Sparse Spatial-temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06023/) (2025)
- [CornerPoint3D: Look at the Nearest Corner Instead of the Center](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02464/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Cross-Dataset Object Detection Generalization under Domain Specificity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09497/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of domain adaptation technologies has not yet reached an ideal level in the current 3D object detection field for autonomous driving, which is mainly due to significant differences in the size of vehicles, as well as the environments they operate in when applied across domains. These factors together hinder the effective transfer and application of knowledge learned from specific datasets. Since the existing evaluation metrics are initially designed for evaluation on a single domain by calculating the 2D or 3D overlap between the prediction and ground-truth bounding boxes, they often suffer from the overfitting problem caused by the size differences among datasets. This raises a fundamental question related to the evaluation of the 3D object detection models' cross-domain performance: Do we really need models to maintain excellent performance in their original 3D bounding boxes after being applied across domains? From a practical application perspective, one of our main focuses is actually on preventing collisions between vehicles and other obstacles, especially in cross-domain scenarios where correctly predicting the size of vehicles is much more difficult. In other words, as long as a model can accurately identify the closest surfaces to the ego vehicle, it is sufficient to effectively avoid obstacles. In this paper, we propose two metrics to measure 3D object detection models' ability of detecting the closer surfaces to the sensor on the ego vehicle, which can be used to evaluate their cross-domain performance more comprehensively and reasonably. Furthermore, we propose a refinement head, named EdgeHead, to guide models to focus more on the learnable closer surfaces, which can greatly improve the cross-domain performance of existing models not only under our new metrics, but even also under the original BEV/3D metrics.