SRDAN: Scale-Aware and Range-Aware Domain Adaptation Network for Cross-Dataset 3D Object Detection

Weichen Zhang, Wen Li, Dong Xu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 6769-6779

Geometric characteristic plays an important role in the representation of an object in 3D point clouds. For example, large objects often contain more points, while small ones contain fewer points. The point clouds of objects near the capture device are denser, while those of distant objects are sparser. These issues bring new challenges to 3D object detection, especially under the domain adaptation scenarios. In this work, we propose a new cross-dataset 3D object detection method named Scale-aware and Range-aware Domain Adaptation Network (SRDAN). We take advantage of the geometric characteristics of 3D data (i.e., size and distance), and propose the scale-aware domain alignment and the range-aware domain alignment strategies to guide the distribution alignment between two domains. For scale-aware domain alignment, we design a 3D voxel-based feature pyramid network to extract multi-scale semantic voxel features, and align the features and instances with similar scales between two domains. For range-aware domain alignment, we introduce a range-guided domain alignment module to align the features of objects according to their distance to the capture device. Extensive experiments under three different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our SRDAN approach, and comprehensive ablation study also validates the importance of geometric characteristics for cross-dataset 3D object detection.