PV-SSD: A Projection and Voxel-based Double Branch Single-Stage 3D Object Detector

LIDAR-based 3D object detection and classification is crucial for autonomous driving. However, inference in real-time from extremely sparse 3D data poses a formidable challenge. To address this issue, a common approach is to project point clouds onto a bird's-eye or perspective view, effectively converting them into an image-like data format. However, this excessive compression of point cloud data often leads to the loss of information. This paper proposes a 3D object detector based on voxel and projection double branch feature extraction (PV-SSD) to address the problem of information loss. We add voxel features input containing rich local semantic information, which is fully fused with the projected features in the feature extraction stage to reduce the local information loss caused by projection. A good performance is achieved compared to the previous work. In addition, this paper makes the following contributions: 1) a voxel feature extraction method with variable receptive fields is proposed; 2) a feature point sampling method by weight sampling is used to filter out the feature points that are more conducive to the detection task; 3) the MSSFA module is proposed based on the SSFA module. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we designed comparison experiments