Transformer3D-Det: Improving 3D Object Detection by Vote Refinement

Voting-based methods (e.g., VoteNet) have achieved promising results for 3D object detection. However, the simple voting operation in VoteNet may lead to less accurate voting results that are far away from the true object centers. In this work, we propose a simple but effective 3D object detection method called Transformer3D-Det (T3D), in which we additionally introduce a transformer based vote refinement module to refine the voting results of VoteNet and can thus significantly improve the 3D object detection performance. Specifically, our T3D framework consists of three modules: a vote generation module, a vote refinement module, and a bounding box generation module. Given an input point cloud, we first utilize the vote generation module to generate multiple coarse vote clusters. Then, the clustered coarse votes will be refined by using our transformer based vote refinement module to produce more accurate and meaningful votes. Finally, the bounding box generation module takes the refined vote clusters as the input and generates the final detection result for the input point cloud. To alleviate the impact of inaccurate votes, we also propose a new non-vote loss function to train our T3D. As a result, our T3D framework can achieve better 3D object detection performance. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D demonstrate the effectiveness of our T3D framework for 3D object detection.