# Towards Streaming LiDAR Object Detection with Point Clouds as Egocentric Sequences

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06944 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06944/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Point clouds, detection and remote sensing, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 38 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Point clouds, detection and remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/point-clouds-detection-and-remote-sensing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [LocalMamba: Visual State Space Model with Windowed Selective Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09338/) (2024)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [Fast Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04702/) (2021)
- [PillarNet: Real-Time and High-Performance Pillar-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07403/) (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)
- [AFDetV2: Rethinking the Necessity of the Second Stage for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09205/) (2021)
- [Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10035/) (2022)
- [FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08739/) (2023)
- [Sparse 3D convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.02890/) (2015)
- [Voxel Mamba: Group-Free State Space Models for Point Cloud based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10700/) (2024)
- [SAFDNet: A Simple and Effective Network for Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05817/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ATLAS: A Large-Scale Evaluation Benchmark for Adversarial LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02924/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and low-latency 3D object detection is essential for autonomous driving, where safety hinges on both rapid response and reliable perception. While rotating LiDAR sensors are widely adopted for their robustness and fidelity, current detectors face a trade-off: streaming methods process partial polar sectors on the fly for fast updates but suffer from limited visibility, cross-sector dependencies, and distortions from retrofitted Cartesian designs, whereas full-scan methods achieve higher accuracy but are bottlenecked by the inherent latency of a LiDAR revolution. We propose Polar-Fast-Cartesian-Full (PFCF), a hybrid detector that combines fast polar processing for intra-sector feature extraction with accurate Cartesian reasoning for full-scene understanding. Central to PFCF is a custom Mamba SSM-based streaming backbone with dimensionally-decomposed convolutions that avoids distortion-heavy planes, enabling parameter-efficient, translation-invariant, and distortion-robust polar representation learning. Local sector features are extracted via this backbone, then accumulated into a sector feature buffer to enable efficient inter-sector communication through a full-scan backbone. PFCF establishes a new Pareto frontier on the Waymo Open dataset, surpassing prior streaming baselines by 10% mAP and matching full-scan accuracy at twice the update rate. Code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mambahttps://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mamba.