# BEVDilation: LiDAR-Centric Multi-Modal Fusion for 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02972 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02972/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2025.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [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)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [Voxel Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02497/) (2021)
- [FUTR3D: A Unified Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10642/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Virtual Point 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06881/) (2021)
- [DeepInteraction: 3D Object Detection via Modality Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11112/) (2022)
- [LoGoNet: Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection with Local-to-Global Cross-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03595/) (2023)
- [UniTR: A Unified and Efficient Multi-Modal Transformer for Bird's-Eye-View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07732/) (2023)
- [Fast Multi-view Consistent 3D Editing with Video Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23172/) (2025)
- [ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00912/) (2024)
- [SparseFusion: Efficient Sparse Multi-Modal Fusion Framework for Long-Range 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10036/) (2024)

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

- [Omni-3DEdit: Generalized Versatile 3D Editing in One-Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17841/) (2026)
- [Motion Cues from Image-based Point Tracking for LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16922/) (2026)
- [CAMF-Det: Closure-Aware Multimodal Fusion for LiDAR-Camera 3D Object Detection on UAV Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09143/) (2026)
- [ACZ-GSeg: Adaptive Concentric Zone-based Two-stage Ground Segmentation for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12110/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Integrating LiDAR and camera information in the bird's eye view (BEV) representation has demonstrated its effectiveness in 3D object detection. However, because of the fundamental disparity in geometric accuracy between these sensors, indiscriminate fusion in previous methods often leads to degraded performance. In this paper, we propose BEVDilation, a novel LiDAR-centric framework that prioritizes LiDAR information in the fusion. By formulating image BEV features as implicit guidance rather than naive concatenation, our strategy effectively alleviates the spatial misalignment caused by image depth estimation errors. Furthermore, the image guidance can effectively help the LiDAR-centric paradigm to address the sparsity and semantic limitations of point clouds. Specifically, we propose a Sparse Voxel Dilation Block that mitigates the inherent point sparsity by densifying foreground voxels through image priors. Moreover, we introduce a Semantic-Guided BEV Dilation Block to enhance the LiDAR feature diffusion processing with image semantic guidance and long-range context capture. On the challenging nuScenes benchmark, BEVDilation achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive computational efficiency. Importantly, our LiDAR-centric strategy demonstrates greater robustness to depth noise compared to naive fusion. The source code is available at https://github.com/gwenzhang/BEVDilation.