PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds

We address the problem of real-time 3D object detection from point clouds in the context of autonomous driving. Speed is critical as detection is a necessary component for safety. Existing approaches are, however expensive in computation due to high dimensionality of point clouds. We utilize the 3D data more efficiently by representing the scene from the Bird's Eye View (BEV), and propose PIXOR, a proposal-free, single-stage detector that outputs oriented 3D object estimates decoded from pixel-wise neural network predictions. The input representation, network architecture, and model optimization are specially designed to balance high accuracy and real-time efficiency. We validate PIXOR on two datasets: the KITTI BEV object detection benchmark, and a large-scale 3D vehicle detection benchmark. In both datasets we show that the proposed detector surpasses other state-of-the-art methods notably in terms of Average Precision (AP), while still runs at 10 FPS.