General and robust voxel feature learning with Transformer for 3D object detection

The self-attention networks and Transformer have dominated machine translation and natural language processing fields,and shown great potential in image vision tasks such as image classification and object detection.Inspired by the great progress of Transformer,we propose a novel general and robust voxel feature encoder for 3D object detection based on the traditional Transformer.We first investigate the permutation invariance of sequence data of the self-attention and apply it to point cloud processing.Then we construct a voxel feature layer based on the self-attention to adaptively learn local and robust context of a voxel according to the spatial relationship and context information exchanging between all points within the voxel.Lastly,we construct a general voxel feature learning framework with the voxel feature layer as the core for 3D object detection.The voxel feature with Transformer(VFT)can be plugged into any other voxel-based 3D object detection framework easily,and serves as the backbone for voxel feature extractor.Experiments results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on 3D object detection.