3D Harmonic Loss: Towards Task-consistent and Time-friendly 3D Object Detection on Edge for V2X Orchestration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 3D harmonic loss function to improve real-time 3D object detection on edge devices for V2X systems, addressing inconsistency issues in sparse pointcloud data and demonstrating enhanced performance and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel 3D harmonic loss function that reduces detection inconsistency in sparse pointclouds and validates its effectiveness for edge deployment in V2X scenarios.

Findings

Significant performance improvement over benchmark models on KITTI and DAIR-V2X-I datasets.

Validated real-time efficiency on Jetson Xavier TX edge device.

Mathematical analysis supports the optimization of the 3D harmonic loss.

Abstract

Edge computing-based 3D perception has received attention in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) because real-time monitoring of traffic candidates potentially strengthens Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) orchestration. Thanks to the capability of precisely measuring the depth information on surroundings from LiDAR, the increasing studies focus on lidar-based 3D detection, which significantly promotes the development of 3D perception. Few methods met the real-time requirement of edge deployment because of high computation-intensive operations. Moreover, an inconsistency problem of object detection remains uncovered in the pointcloud domain due to large sparsity. This paper thoroughly analyses this problem, comprehensively roused by recent works on determining inconsistency problems in the image specialisation. Therefore, we proposed a 3D harmonic loss function to relieve the pointcloud based inconsistent predictions. Moreover, the feasibility of 3D harmonic loss is demonstrated from a mathematical optimization perspective. The KITTI dataset and DAIR-V2X-I dataset are used for simulations, and our proposed method considerably improves the performance than benchmark models. Further, the simulative deployment on an edge device (Jetson Xavier TX) validates our proposed model's efficiency.