Joint 3D instance segmentation and object detection for autonomous driving

Currently, in Autonomous Driving (AD), most of the 3D object detection frameworks (either anchor- or anchor-freebased) consider the detection as a Bounding Box (BBox) regression problem. However, this compact representation is not sufficient to explore all the information of the objects. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but practical detection framework to jointly predict the 3D BBox and instance segmentation. For instance segmentation, we propose a Spatial Embeddings (SEs) strategy to assemble all foreground points into their corresponding object centers. Base on the SE results, the object proposals can be generated based on a simple clustering strategy. For each cluster, only one proposal is generated. Therefore, the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) process is no longer needed here. Finally, with our proposed instance-aware ROI pooling, the BBox is refined by a second-stage network. Experimental results on the public KITTI dataset show that the proposed SEs can significantly improve the instance segmentation results compared with other feature embedding-based method. Meanwhile, it also outperforms most of the 3D object detectors on the KITTI testing benchmark.