SimFuse3D: Source-Guided Target Simulation and Confidence-Guided Multi-Stage Localization Reweighting for Cross-Platform 3D Object Detection

Changes in sensor height and viewpoint alter object-level point distributions, making cross-platform LiDAR unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) difficult. Self-training uses labeled source scans and unlabeled target scans, yet a retained prediction may provide a useful target location while enclosing sparse foreground returns, background clutter, or points inconsistent with the predicted box. We refer to this mismatch as box-point inconsistency. We introduce SimFuse3D, which preserves the target placement and repairs the associated pseudo object using measured geometry from labeled source scans. Object Memory retrieves a similar labeled source instance. Target Simulation places the retrieved source geometry at the target location, aligns its points with the target viewing geometry, and filters the aligned crop to approximate the target observation. Confidence-Guided Multi-Stage Localization Reweighting (CMLR) maps each target pseudo-object confidence score to a bounded weight shared by RPN localization and R-CNN box regression. All components operate only during adaptation, leaving the detector architecture and inference graph unchanged. Across six cross-platform transfers, SimFuse3D consistently outperforms Pi3DET-Net and achieves the best performance among the compared adaptation methods on nearly all metrics. On nuScenes-to-KITTI, it ranks first among the compared adaptation methods with both evaluated detectors.