Image attention transformer network for indoor 3D object detection

Point clouds and RGB images are both critical data for 3D object detection. While recent multi-modal methods combine them directly and show remarkable performances, they ignore the distinct forms of these two types of data. For mitigating the influence of this intrinsic difference on performance, we propose a novel but effective fusion model named LI-Attention model, which takes both RGB features and point cloud features into consideration and assigns a weight to each RGB feature by attention mechanism. Furthermore, based on the LI-Attention model, we propose a 3D object detection method called image attention transformer network (IAT-Net) specialized for indoor RGB-D scene. Compared with previous work on multi-modal detection, IAT-Net fuses elaborate RGB features from 2D detection results with point cloud features in attention mechanism, meanwhile generates and refines 3D detection results with transformer model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art performance on two widely used benchmarks of indoor 3D object detection, SUN RGB-D and NYU Depth V2, while ablation studies have been provided to analyze the effect of each module. And the source code for the proposed IAT-Net is publicly available at https://github.com/wisper181/IAT-Net.