Robust Single-Stage Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection via Detachable Latent Diffusion
This work addresses efficiency and robustness in 3D object detection for applications like autonomous driving, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient multi-step inference in robust 3D object detection by proposing RSDNet, a single-stage fully sparse network with a detachable latent diffusion framework, which achieves state-of-the-art detection on public benchmarks.
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have shown success in robust 3D object detection tasks. Existing methods often rely on the score matching from 3D boxes or pre-trained diffusion priors. However, they typically require multi-step iterations in inference, which limits efficiency. To address this, we propose a Robust single-stage fully Sparse 3D object Detection Network with a Detachable Latent Framework (DLF) of DDPMs, named RSDNet. Specifically, RSDNet learns the denoising process in latent feature spaces through lightweight denoising networks like multi-level denoising autoencoders (DAEs). This enables RSDNet to effectively understand scene distributions under multi-level perturbations, achieving robust and reliable detection. Meanwhile, we reformulate the noising and denoising mechanisms of DDPMs, enabling DLF to construct multi-type and multi-level noise samples and targets, enhancing RSDNet robustness to multiple perturbations. Furthermore, a semantic-geometric conditional guidance is introduced to perceive the object boundaries and shapes, alleviating the center feature missing problem in sparse representations, enabling RSDNet to perform in a fully sparse detection pipeline. Moreover, the detachable denoising network design of DLF enables RSDNet to perform single-step detection in inference, further enhancing detection efficiency. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that RSDNet can outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art detection.