3D Harmonic Loss: Towards Task-consistent and Time-friendly 3D Object Detection on Edge for Intelligent Transportation System

Edge computing-based 3D perception has received attention in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) because real-time monitoring of traffic candidates potentially strengthens Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) orchestration. Thanks to the capability of precisely measuring the depth information on surroundings from LiDAR, the increasing studies focus on lidar-based 3D detection, which significantly promotes the development of 3D perception. Few methods met the real-time requirement of edge deployment because of high computation-intensive operations. Moreover, an inconsistency problem of object detection remains uncovered in the pointcloud domain due to large sparsity. This paper thoroughly analyses this problem, comprehensively roused by recent works on determining inconsistency problems in the image specialisation. Therefore, we proposed a 3D harmonic loss function to relieve the pointcloud based inconsistent predictions. Moreover, the feasibility of 3D harmonic loss is demonstrated from a mathematical optimization perspective. The KITTI dataset and DAIR-V2X-I dataset are used for simulations, and our proposed method considerably improves the performance than benchmark models. Further, the simulative deployment on an edge device (Jetson Xavier TX) validates our proposed model's efficiency. Our code is open-source and publicly available.