On-the-Fly Object-aware Representative Point Selection in Point Cloud

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised and supervised hybrid method for selecting representative points in point clouds, improving efficiency and information retention for autonomous vehicle applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel two-step framework combining density peak-based detection and strategic sampling, enhancing point cloud downsampling for object preservation in AVs.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on KITTI and nuScenes datasets.

Maintains high object information retention across various sampling rates.

Model-agnostic approach seamlessly integrates with different downstream models.

Abstract

Point clouds are essential for object modeling and play a critical role in assisting driving tasks for autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, the significant volume of data generated by AVs creates challenges for storage, bandwidth, and processing cost. To tackle these challenges, we propose a representative point selection framework for point cloud downsampling, which preserves critical object-related information while effectively filtering out irrelevant background points. Our method involves two steps: (1) Object Presence Detection, where we introduce an unsupervised density peak-based classifier and a supervised Na\"ive Bayes classifier to handle diverse scenarios, and (2) Sampling Budget Allocation, where we propose a strategy that selects object-relevant points while maintaining a high retention rate of object information. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both efficiency and effectiveness across varying sampling rates. As a model-agnostic solution, our approach integrates seamlessly with diverse downstream models, making it a valuable and scalable addition to the 3D point cloud downsampling toolkit for AV applications.