Att-BEVFusion: An Object Detection Algorithm for Camera and LiDAR Fusion Under BEV Features

To improve the accuracy of detecting small and long-distance objects while self-driving cars are in motion, in this paper, we propose a 3D object detection method, Att-BEVFusion, which fuses camera and LiDAR data in a bird’s-eye view (BEV). First, the transformation from the camera view to the BEV space is achieved through an implicit supervision-based method, and then the LiDAR BEV feature point cloud is voxelized and converted into BEV features. Then, a channel attention mechanism is introduced to design a BEV feature fusion network to realize the fusion of camera BEV feature space and LiDAR BEV feature space. Finally, regarding the issue of insufficient global reasoning in the BEV fusion features generated by the channel attention mechanism, as well as the challenge of inadequate interaction between features. We further develop a BEV self-attention mechanism to apply global operations on the features. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Att-BEVFusion fusion algorithm on the nuScenes dataset, and the results demonstrate that the algorithm achieved 72.0% mean average precision (mAP) and 74.3% nuScenes detection score (NDS), with an advanced detection accuracy of 88.9% and 91.8% for single-item detection of automotive and pedestrian categories, respectively.