We study the problem of efficient object detection of 3D LiDAR point clouds. To reduce the memory and computational cost, existing point-based pipelines usually adopt task-agnostic random sampling or farthest point sampling to progressively downsample input point clouds, despite the fact that not all points are equally important to the task of object detection. In particular, the foreground points are inherently more important than background points for object detectors. Motivated by this, we propose a highly-efficient single-stage point-based 3D detector in this paper, termed IA-SSD. The key of our approach is to exploit two learnable, task-oriented, instance-aware downsampling strategies to hierarchically select the foreground points belonging to objects of interest. Additionally, we also introduce a contextual centroid perception module to further estimate precise instance centers. Finally, we build our IA-SSD following the encoder-only architecture for efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on several large-scale detection benchmarks demonstrate the competitive performance of our IA-SSD. Thanks to the low memory footprint and a high degree of parallelism, it achieves a superior speed of 80+ frames-per-second on the KITTI dataset with a single RTX2080Ti GPU. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/yifanzhang713/IA-SSD}.

本文提出了一种高效的基于点云的3D检测器IA-SSD，利用可学习的面向任务的实例感知下采样策略分层选择感兴趣物体的前景点，进一步估计精确的实例中心，并采用仅编码器架构实现。大规模检测基准测试表明，该模型具有卓越的速度性能，能够以80个以上的速度在KITTI数据集上进行实时检测。

不是所有点都相同：学习针对3D LiDAR点云的高效点检测器