An Empirical Study of the Generalization Ability of Lidar 3D Object Detectors to Unseen Domains

George Eskandar; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 23815-23825

3D Object Detectors (3D-OD) are crucial for understanding the environment in many robotic tasks especially autonomous driving. Including 3D information via Lidar sensors improves accuracy greatly. However such detectors perform poorly on domains they were not trained on i.e. different locations sensors weather etc. limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications. There exist methods to adapt 3D-ODs to these domains; however these methods treat 3D-ODs as a black box neglecting underlying architectural decisions and source-domain training strategies. Instead we dive deep into the details of 3D-ODs focusing our efforts on fundamental factors that influence robustness prior to domain adaptation. We systematically investigate four design choices (and the interplay between them) often overlooked in 3D-OD robustness and domain adaptation: architecture voxel encoding data augmentations and anchor strategies. We assess their impact on the robustness of nine state-of-the-art 3D-ODs across six benchmarks encompassing three types of domain gaps - sensor type weather and location. Our main findings are: (1) transformer backbones with local point features are more robust than 3D CNNs (2) test-time anchor size adjustment is crucial for adaptation across geographical locations significantly boosting scores without retraining (3) source-domain augmentations allow the model to generalize to low-resolution sensors and (4) surprisingly robustness to bad weather is improved when training directly on more clean weather data than on training with bad weather data. We outline our main conclusions and findings to provide practical guidance on developing more robust 3D-ODs.