Context-Aware Data Augmentation for LIDAR 3D Object Detection
This addresses a specific issue in 3D object detection for autonomous driving by improving data augmentation to better utilize annotated data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing GT-sample methods.
The paper tackles the problem of unrealistic object placement in data augmentation for LiDAR 3D object detection by proposing a context-aware method (CA-aug) that calculates 'Validspace' to ensure reasonable placement, resulting in an 8% mAP improvement on the KITTI dataset.
For 3D object detection, labeling lidar point cloud is difficult, so data augmentation is an important module to make full use of precious annotated data. As a widely used data augmentation method, GT-sample effectively improves detection performance by inserting groundtruths into the lidar frame during training. However, these samples are often placed in unreasonable areas, which misleads model to learn the wrong context information between targets and backgrounds. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a context-aware data augmentation method (CA-aug) , which ensures the reasonable placement of inserted objects by calculating the "Validspace" of the lidar point cloud. CA-aug is lightweight and compatible with other augmentation methods. Compared with the GT-sample and the similar method in Lidar-aug(SOTA), it brings higher accuracy to the existing detectors. We also present an in-depth study of augmentation methods for the range-view-based(RV-based) models and find that CA-aug can fully exploit the potential of RV-based networks. The experiment on KITTI val split shows that CA-aug can improve the mAP of the test model by 8%.