Multi-Modal Data Fusion for 3D Object Detection Using Dual-Attention Mechanism

To address the issue of missing feature information for small objects caused by the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds, as well as the poor detection performance on small objects due to their weak feature representation, this paper proposes a multi-modal 3D object detection method based on an improved PointPillars framework. First, LiDAR point clouds are fused with camera images at the data level, incorporating 2D semantic information to enhance small-object feature representation. Second, a Pillar-wise Channel Attention (PCA) module is introduced to emphasize critical features before converting pillar features into pseudo-image representations. Additionally, a Spatial Attention Module (SAM) is embedded into the backbone network to enhance spatial feature representation. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that, compared with the baseline PointPillars, the proposed method significantly improves small-object detection performance. Specifically, under the bird’s-eye view (BEV) evaluation metrics, the Average Precision (AP) for pedestrians and cyclists increases by 7.06% and 3.08%, respectively; under the 3D evaluation metrics, these improvements are 4.36% and 2.58%. Compared with existing methods, the improved model also achieves relatively higher accuracy in detecting small objects. Visualization results further demonstrate the enhanced detection capability of the proposed method for small objects with different difficulty levels. Overall, the proposed approach effectively improves 3D object detection performance, particularly for small objects, in complex autonomous driving scenarios.