DSPDet3D: Dynamic Spatial Pruning for 3D Small Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a new detection framework for 3D small object detection. Although deep learning-based 3D object detection methods have achieved great success in recent years, current methods still struggle on small objects due to weak geometric information. With in-depth study, we find increasing the spatial resolution of the feature maps significantly boosts the performance of 3D small object detection. And more interestingly, though the computational overhead increases dramatically with resolution, the growth mainly comes from the upsampling operation of the decoder. Inspired by this, we present a high-resolution multi-level detector with dynamic spatial pruning named DSPDet3D, which detects objects from large to small by iterative upsampling and meanwhile prunes the spatial representation of the scene at regions where there is no smaller object to be detected in higher resolution. As the 3D detector only needs to predict sparse bounding boxes, pruning a large amount of uninformative features does not degrade the detection performance but significantly reduces the computational cost of upsampling. In this way, our DSPDet3D achieves high accuracy on small object detection while requiring even less memory footprint and inference time. On ScanNet and TO-SCENE dataset, our method improves the detection performance of small objects to a new level while achieving leading inference speed among all mainstream indoor 3D object detection methods.