Real-Time 3D Object Detection with Inference-Aligned Learning
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in 3D object detection for applications like augmented reality and robotics, offering incremental improvements over prior methods.
The paper tackles the training-inference gap in real-time 3D object detection for indoor point clouds by introducing the SR3D framework, which improves accuracy on ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D benchmarks while maintaining real-time speed.
Real-time 3D object detection from point clouds is essential for dynamic scene understanding in applications such as augmented reality, robotics and navigation. We introduce a novel Spatial-prioritized and Rank-aware 3D object detection (SR3D) framework for indoor point clouds, to bridge the gap between how detectors are trained and how they are evaluated. This gap stems from the lack of spatial reliability and ranking awareness during training, which conflicts with the ranking-based prediction selection used as inference. Such a training-inference gap hampers the model's ability to learn representations aligned with inference-time behavior. To address the limitation, SR3D consists of two components tailored to the spatial nature of point clouds during training: a novel spatial-prioritized optimal transport assignment that dynamically emphasizes well-located and spatially reliable samples, and a rank-aware adaptive self-distillation scheme that adaptively injects ranking perception via a self-distillation paradigm. Extensive experiments on ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D show that SR3D effectively bridges the training-inference gap and significantly outperforms prior methods in accuracy while maintaining real-time speed.