Anti-Noise 3D Object Detection of Multimodal Feature Attention Fusion Based on PV-RCNN

3D object detection methods based on camera and LiDAR fusion are susceptible to environmental noise. Due to the mismatch of physical characteristics of the two sensors, the feature vectors encoded by the feature layer are in different feature spaces. This leads to the problem of feature information deviation, which has an impact on detection performance. To address this problem, a point-guided feature abstract method is presented to fuse the camera and LiDAR at first. The extracted image features and point cloud features are aggregated to keypoints for enhancing information redundancy. Second, the proposed multimodal feature attention (MFA) mechanism is used to achieve adaptive fusion of point cloud features and image features with information from multiple feature spaces. Finally, a projection-based farthest point sampling (P-FPS) is proposed to downsample the raw point cloud, which can project more keypoints onto the close object and improve the sampling rate of the point-guided image features. The 3D bounding boxes of the object is obtained by the region of interest (ROI) pooling layer and the fully connected layer. The proposed 3D object detection algorithm is evaluated on three different datasets, and the proposed algorithm achieved better detection performance and robustness when the image and point cloud data contain rain noise. The test results on a physical test platform further validate the effectiveness of the algorithm.