2D-Empowered 3D Object Detection on the Edge

3D object detection has a pivotal role in a wide range of applications, most notably autonomous driving and robotics. These applications are commonly deployed on edge devices to promptly interact with the environment, and often require near real-time response. With limited computation power, it is challenging to execute 3D detection on the edge using highly complex neural networks. Common approaches such as offloading to the cloud brings latency overheads due to the large amount of 3D point cloud data during transmission. To resolve the tension between wimpy edge devices and compute-intensive inference workloads, we explore the possibility of transforming fast 2D detection results to extrapolate 3D bounding boxes. To this end, we present Moby, a novel system that demonstrates the feasibility and potential of our approach. Our main contributions are two-fold: First, we design a 2D-to-3D transformation pipeline that takes as input the point cloud data from LiDAR and 2D bounding boxes from camera that are captured at exactly the same time, and generate 3D bounding boxes efficiently and accurately based on detection results of the previous frames without running 3D detectors. Second, we design a frame offloading scheduler that dynamically launches a 3D detection when the error of 2D-to-3D transformation accumulates to a certain level, so the subsequent transformations can draw upon the latest 3D detection results with better accuracy. Extensive evaluation on NVIDIA Jetson TX2 with the autonomous driving dataset KITTI and real-world 4G/LTE traces shows that, Moby reduces the end-to-end latency by up to 91.9% with mild accuracy drop compared to baselines. Further, Moby shows excellent energy efficiency by saving power consumption and memory footprint up to 75.7% and 48.1%, respectively.