We study the problem of efficient object detection of 3D LiDAR point clouds. To reduce the memory and computational cost, existing point-based pipelines usually adopt task-agnostic random sampling or farthest point sampling to progressively downsample input point clouds, despite the fact that not all points are equally important to the task of object detection. In particular, the foreground points are inherently more important than background points for object detectors. Motivated by this, we propose a highly-efficient single-stage point-based 3D detector in this paper, termed IA-SSD. The key of our approach is to exploit two learnable, task-oriented, instance-aware downsampling strategies to hierarchically select the foreground points belonging to objects of interest. Additionally, we also introduce a contextual centroid perception module to further estimate precise instance centers. Finally, we build our IA-SSD following the encoder-only architecture for efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on several large-scale detection benchmarks demonstrate the competitive performance of our IA-SSD. Thanks to the low memory footprint and a high degree of parallelism, it achieves a superior speed of 80+ frames-per-second on the KITTI dataset with a single RTX2080Ti GPU. The code is available at https://github.com/yifanzhang713/IA-SSD.

Abstract Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct detailed structures from partial observations. However, previous methods often suffered from inaccurate neighbourhood feature extraction and rough reconstruction of complex structures, which is difficult to complete detailed semantic shapes. To solve this problem, we present a method that applies dynamic transformers with adaptive neighbourhood feature fusion operations to resume complete point clouds. Firstly, we propose an adaptive neighbourhood feature extraction module, which contains a learnable global neighbourhood selection strategy and a traditional local k‐nearest neighbour strategy to dynamically select neighbourhood points according to the shape of different objects. Secondly, we observed that traditional point generation methods based on folding‐series operations limit their capacity of generating complex and faithful shapes. Inspired by cell division, we regard the process of reconstructing as point splitting and propose a genetic hierarchical point generation module, which means current points can inherit shape features from previous points and generate more detailed structures of their own. Extensive experiments of point cloud completion are carried out on PCN and Completion3D datasets to verify the effectiveness of our method. The average category chamfer distances of our method are 7.17(×10 −3 ) in PCN and 7.96(×10 −4 ) in Completion3D, which has better completion performance than other methods.