Long-Tailed 3D Detection via 2D Late Fusion

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must accurately detect objects from both common and rare classes for safe navigation, motivating the problem of Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection (LT3D). Contemporary LiDAR-based 3D detectors perform poorly on rare classes (e.g., CenterPoint only achieves 5.1 AP on stroller) as it is difficult to recognize objects from sparse LiDAR points alone. RGB images provide visual evidence to help resolve such ambiguities, motivating the study of RGB-LiDAR fusion. In this paper, we delve into a simple late-fusion framework that ensembles independently trained RGB and LiDAR detectors. Unlike recent end-to-end methods which require paired multi-modal training data, our late-fusion approach can easily leverage large-scale uni-modal datasets, significantly improving rare class detection. In particular, we examine three critical components in this late-fusion framework from first principles, including whether to train 2D or 3D RGB detectors, whether to match RGB and LiDAR detections in 3D or the projected 2D image plane, and how to fuse matched detections.Extensive experiments reveal that 2D RGB detectors achieve better recognition accuracy than 3D RGB detectors, matching on the 2D image plane mitigates depth estimation errors, and fusing scores probabilistically with calibration leads to state-of-the-art LT3D performance. Our late-fusion approach achieves 51.4 mAP on the established nuScenes LT3D benchmark, improving over prior work by 5.9 mAP.