PMPF: Point-Cloud Multiple-Pixel Fusion-Based 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

Today, multi-sensor fusion detection frameworks in autonomous driving, especially sequence-based data-level fusion frameworks, face high latency and coupling issues and generally perform worse than LiDAR-only detectors. On this basis, we propose PMPF, point-cloud multiple-pixel fusion, for 3D object detection. PMPF projects the point cloud data onto the image plane, where the region pixels are processed to correspond with the points and decorated to the point cloud data, such that the fused point cloud data can be applied to LiDAR-only detectors with autoencoders. PMPF is a plug-and-play, decoupled multi-sensor fusion detection framework with low latency. Extensive experiments on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark show that PMPF vastly improves upon most of the LiDAR-only detectors, e.g., PointPillars, SECOND, CIA-SSD, SE-SSD four state-of-the-art one-stage detectors, and PointRCNN, PV-RCNN, Part-A(2) three two-stage detectors.