Robust Collaborative 3D Object Detection in Presence of Pose Errors

Collaborative 3D object detection exploits information exchange among multiple agents to enhance accuracy of object detection in presence of sensor impairments such as occlusion. However, in practice, pose estimation errors due to imperfect localization would cause spatial message misalignment and significantly reduce the performance of collaboration. To alleviate adverse impacts of pose errors, we propose CoAlign, a novel hybrid collaboration framework that is robust to unknown pose errors. The proposed solution relies on a novel agent-object pose graph modeling to enhance pose consistency among collaborating agents. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-scale data fusion strategy to aggregate intermediate features at multiple spatial resolutions. Comparing with previous works, which require ground-truth pose for training supervision, our proposed CoAlign is more practical since it doesn't require any ground-truth pose supervision in the training and makes no specific assumptions on pose errors. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method is carried out on multiple datasets, certifying that CoAlign significantly reduce relative localization error and achieving the state of art detection performance when pose errors exist. Code are made available for the use of the research community at https://github.com/yifanlu0227/CoAlign.
Comment: Accepted by ICRA2023. This version updates the final results with data augmentation and correct AP calculations(sort the detections of all samples by confidence)