RT3D: Real-Time 3-D Vehicle Detection in LiDAR Point Cloud for Autonomous Driving

For autonomous driving, vehicle detection is the prerequisite for many tasks like collision avoidance and path planning. In this letter, we present a real-time three-dimensional (RT3D) vehicle detection method that utilizes pure LiDAR point cloud to predict the location, orientation, and size of vehicles. In contrast to previous 3-D object detection methods, we used a pre-RoIpooling convolution technique that moves a majority of the convolution operations to ahead of the RoI pooling, leaving just a small part behind, so that significantly boosts the computation efficiency. We also propose a pose-sensitive feature map design which can be strongly activated by the relative poses of vehicles, leading to a high regression accuracy on the location, orientation, and size of vehicles. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark dataset show that the RT3D is not only able to deliver competitive detection accuracy against state-of-the-art methods, but also the first LiDAR-based 3-D vehicle detection work that completes detection within 0.09 s which is even shorter than the scan period of mainstream LiDAR sensors.