EFMF-pillars: 3D object detection based on enhanced features and multi-scale fusion

Abstract As unmanned vehicle technology advances rapidly, obstacle recognition and target detection are crucial links, which directly affect the driving safety and efficiency of unmanned vehicles. In response to the inaccurate localization of small targets such as pedestrians in current object detection tasks and the problem of losing local features in the PointPillars, this paper proposes a three-dimensional object detection method based on improved PointPillars. Firstly, addressing the issue of lost spatial and local information in the PointPillars, the feature encoding part of the PointPillars is improved, and a new pillar feature enhancement extraction module, CSM-Module, is proposed. Channel encoding and spatial encoding are introduced in the new pillar feature enhancement extraction module, fully considering the spatial information and local detailed geometric information of each pillar, thereby enhancing the feature representation capability of each pillar. Secondly, based on the fusion of CSPDarknet and SENet, a new backbone network CSE-Net is designed in this paper, enabling the extraction of rich contextual semantic information and multi-scale global features, thereby enhancing the feature extraction capability. Our method achieves higher detection accuracy when validated on the KITTI dataset. Compared to the original network, the improved algorithm’s average detection accuracy is increased by 3.42%, it shows that the method is reasonable and valuable.