# Fusion4CA: Boosting 3D Object Detection via Comprehensive Image Exploitation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05305 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05305/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [TransFusion: Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11496/) (2022)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11301/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PolarFormer: Multi-camera 3D Object Detection with Polar Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15398/) (2022)
- [Focal Sparse Convolutional Networks for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12463/) (2022)
- [Lidar for Autonomous Driving: The principles, challenges, and trends for automotive lidar and perception systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08467/) (2020)
- [FusionPainting: Multimodal Fusion with Adaptive Attention for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12449/) (2021)
- [Sparse Fuse Dense: Towards High Quality 3D Detection with Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09780/) (2022)
- [Virtual Sparse Convolution for Multimodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02314/) (2023)
- [M3DeTR: Multi-representation, Multi-scale, Mutual-relation 3D Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11896/) (2021)
- [IS-Fusion: Instance-Scene Collaborative Fusion for Multimodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15241/) (2024)
- [SAFDNet: A Simple and Effective Network for Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05817/) (2024)
- [VoteNet: A Deep Learning Label Fusion Method for Multi-Atlas Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08963/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nowadays, an increasing number of works fuse LiDAR and RGB data in the bird's-eye view (BEV) space for 3D object detection in autonomous driving systems. However, existing methods suffer from over-reliance on the LiDAR branch, with insufficient exploration of RGB information. To tackle this issue, we propose Fusion4CA, which is built upon the classic BEVFusion framework and dedicated to fully exploiting visual input with plug-and-play components. Specifically, a contrastive alignment module is designed to calibrate image features with 3D geometry, and a camera auxiliary branch is introduced to mine RGB information sufficiently during training. For further performance enhancement, we leverage an off-the-shelf cognitive adapter to make the most of pretrained image weights, and integrate a standard coordinate attention module into the fusion stage as a supplementary boost. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method achieves 69.7% mAP with only 6 training epochs and a mere 3.48% increase in inference parameters, yielding a 1.2% improvement over the baseline which is fully trained for 20 epochs. Extensive experiments in a simulated lunar environment further validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Our code will be released through Fusion4CA.