Previous works for LiDAR-based 3D object detection mainly focus on the
single-frame paradigm. In this paper, we propose to detect 3D objects by
exploiting temporal information in multiple frames, i.e., the point cloud
videos. We empirically categorize the temporal information into short-term and
long-term patterns. To encode the short-term data, we present a Grid Message
Passing Network (GMPNet), which considers each grid (i.e., the grouped points)
as a node and constructs a k-NN graph with the neighbor grids. To update
features for a grid, GMPNet iteratively collects information from its
neighbors, thus mining the motion cues in grids from nearby frames. To further
aggregate the long-term frames, we propose an Attentive Spatiotemporal
Transformer GRU (AST-GRU), which contains a Spatial Transformer Attention (STA)
module and a Temporal Transformer Attention (TTA) module. STA and TTA enhance
the vanilla GRU to focus on small objects and better align the moving objects.
Our overall framework supports both online and offline video object detection
in point clouds. We implement our algorithm based on prevalent anchor-based and
anchor-free detectors. The evaluation results on the challenging nuScenes
benchmark show the superior performance of our method, achieving the 1st on the
leaderboard without any bells and whistles, by the time the paper is submitted.

本文采用多帧点云视频中的时间信息来探测 3D 物体。研究者们提出了一种名为 GMPNet 的格网信息传递网络来编码短期时间信息，并提出了一个名为 AST-GRU 的基于注意力的时空变换 GRU 来进一步聚合长期帧。在 NuScenes 基准测试中，该方法表现优异，且不需要任何额外的手段。