Accurately detecting objects in the environment is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles. However, obtaining annotated data for detection is expensive and time-consuming. We introduce PatchContrast, a novel self-supervised point cloud pre-training framework for 3D object detection. We propose to utilize two levels of abstraction to learn discriminative representation from unlabeled data: proposal-level and patch-level. The proposal-level aims at localizing objects in relation to their surroundings, whereas the patch-level adds information about the internal connections between the object's components, hence distinguishing between different objects based on their individual components. We demonstrate how these levels can be integrated into self-supervised pre-training for various backbones to enhance the downstream 3D detection task. We show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three commonly-used 3D detection datasets.

基于自主车辆的关键挑战是准确检测环境中的物体。我们引入PatchContrast，这是一个创新的自我监督点云预训练框架，用于3D物体检测。通过提出两个抽象层次的利用，我们学习未标记数据的判别性表示：提案级别和补丁级别。提案级别旨在确定物体相对于周围环境的位置，而补丁级别增加了关于物体组件之间内部连接的信息，从而根据它们的独立组件区分不同的对象。我们展示了如何将这些级别集成到自我监督预训练中以增强下游的3D检测任务，并证明我们的方法在三个常用的3D检测数据集上优于现有的最先进模型。

PatchContrast：自监督预训练用于3D物体检测