There are two mainstream approaches for object detection: top-down and bottom-up. The state-of-the-art approaches are mainly top-down methods. In this paper, we demonstrate that bottom-up approaches show competitive performance compared with top-down approaches and have higher recall rates. Our approach, named CenterNet, detects each object as a triplet of keypoints (top-left and bottom-right corners and the center keypoint). We first group the corners according to some designed cues and confirm the object locations based on the center keypoints. The corner keypoints allow the approach to detect objects of various scales and shapes and the center keypoint reduces the confusion introduced by a large number of false-positive proposals. Our approach is an anchor-free detector because it does not need to define explicit anchor boxes. We adapt our approach to backbones with different structures, including ‘hourglass’-like networks and ‘pyramid’-like networks, which detect objects in single-resolution and multi-resolution feature maps, respectively. On the MS-COCO dataset, CenterNet with Res2Net-101 and Swin-Transformer achieve average precisions (APs) of 53.7% and 57.1%, respectively, outperforming all existing bottom-up detectors and achieving state-of-the-art performance. We also design a real-time CenterNet model, which achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and speed, with an AP of 43.6% at 30.5 frames per second (FPS).

Detecting small objects is a challenging task due to their low resolution and noisy representation even using deep learning methods. In this paper, we propose a novel object detection method based on the channel-aware deconvolutional network (CADNet) for accurate small object detection. Speci?cally, we develop the channel-aware deconvolution (ChaDeConv) layer to exploit the correlations of feature maps in different channels across deeper layers, improving the recall rate of small objects at low additional computational costs. Following the ChaDeConv layer, the multiple region proposal sub-network (Multi-RPN) is employed to supervise and optimize multiple detection layers simultaneously to achieve better accuracy. The Multi-RPN module is only used in the training phase and does not increase the computation cost of the inference. Additionally, we design a new anchor matching strategy based on the center point translation (CPTMatching) of anchors to select more extending anchors as positive samples in the training phase. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007/2012, MS COCO and UAVDT datasets show that the proposed CADNet achieves stateof-the-art performance compared to existing methods.

Integrating LiDAR and camera data is crucial for precise 3D object detection. Existing methods resort to augmenting virtual points from 2D image space in a random manner to complete the appearance of 3D objects with sparse points. However, these augmented virtual points have unreasonable 3D positions and representations, which brings serious negative effects on accurate detection. To this end, we introduce a general 3D object detection framework called Virtual Point Augmenting (VPA) to enrich the 3D point cloud by controllably generating virtual points with accurate depth and position information as well as domain-gap-eliminated multi-modal representations from image and point cloud spaces. VPA contains two core designs, namely Hybrid Sampling Method (HSM) and Fine-Grained Cross-modal Fusion (FGCF). HSM uses the constructed seed point distribution map based on the edge score and mask score map to sample high-quality seed points, and employs a feature similarity function to sample with k neighbors’ depth to obtain more accurate depth for the seed points, thereby enhancing the quality of the virtual points’ 3D positions. FGCF fuses the multi-modal features, i.e., the semantic feature, the geometric feature from the image space, and the 3D position feature in an adaptive manner using self-attention mechanism, thereby further improving the representation of the virtual points. We apply VPA to the LiDAR-based method CenterPoint and fusion-based method Cross-modal transformer. Experimental results on the nuScenes, KITTI, and Waymo benchmarks validate the efficiency of our VPA, which achieves promising performance with 72.9% mAP and 74.8% NDS without using test-time augmentation and model ensemble techniques on the nuScenes test set. Code is available at https://github.com/jianpingZhonggit/vpa.git.

Accurately detecting objects in 3D scenes is crucial for autonomous driving. Although existing voxel-based methods have achieved remarkable progress, their performance on tail objects remains unsatisfactory. We identify two core issues contributing to this phenomenon: the detectors frequently misidentify some background elements as foreground objects, and there is a misalignment between the classification score and detection quality. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an object-level guided multi-modal 3D object detector with an Object-Guided Feature Fusion (OFF) module and a Hierarchical Sample Selection (HSS) strategy, named OGMMDet. Specifically, OFF introduces rich image features to enhance the representation of objects while using an object distribution heatmap to suppress the background. This approach provides geometry clues for tail objects while providing category priors to filter out the background. HSS uses a local-to-global ranking approach to calculate the relative classification loss weights of all proposals. It assigns higher weights to proposals with higher IoU when optimizing classification branches. This ensures that the model focuses its optimization on these higher-quality proposals. Consequently, there is a positive correlation between the classification score and IoU. This method alleviates the misalignment between the classification score and detection quality. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our OGMMDet, which achieves 45.61% and 68.96% mean Average Precision (mAP) on pedestrians and cyclists on the KITTI benchmark, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhongJianPing1/ogmmdet.git .