Attention-Guided Dual-Path Feature Fusion Network for PointPillars-Based LiDAR 3D Object Detection

To address the challenges of insufficient feature representation and the difficulty of detecting sparse and distant objects in UAV-borne LiDAR point clouds—which exhibit significantly lower point density than terrestrial/mobile LiDAR scans—this paper proposes an enhanced detection algorithm built upon the PointPillars framework. First, a coordinate attention mechanism is incorporated to enhance the network’s ability to capture spatial geometric information. Furthermore, the backbone network is redesigned with a dual-path structure and a feature modulation fusion module, enabling adaptive integration of multi-scale features. Experimental evaluations conducted on a custom simulated UAV-borne LiDAR point cloud dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 85.35% 3D mAP and 88.26% BEV mAP, corresponding to absolute improvements of 21.61 and 7.85 percentage points compared with the original PointPillars model. In addition, the proposed approach demonstrates consistent performance on the publicly available KITTI benchmark through preliminary cross-dataset validation. The results indicate that the proposed method can effectively improve the detection accuracy and robustness of LiDAR-based 3D object detection in complex environments.