This paper proposes a computationally efficient approach to detecting objects natively in 3D point clouds using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In particular, this is achieved by leveraging a feature-centric voting scheme to implement novel convolutional layers which explicitly exploit the sparsity encountered in the input. To this end we examine the trade-off between accuracy and speed for different architectures and additionally propose to use an L1 penalty on the filter activations to further encourage sparsity in the intermediate representations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose sparse convolutional layers and L1 regularisation for efficient large-scale processing of 3D data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on the KITTI object detection benchmark and show that Vote3Deep models with as few as three layers outperform the previous state of the art in both laser and laser-vision based approaches across the board by margins of up to 40% while remaining highly competitive in terms of processing time.

本文提出了一种在三维点云中有效检测对象的方法，使用卷积神经网络并利用稀疏性，提出了基于特征中心投票方案的卷积层和L1正则化，实现了高效的大规模三维数据处理，并在KITTI物体检测基准测试中表现出优异的成果。

Vote3Deep：使用高效卷积神经网络快速检测三维点云中的物体