NBA3D: Neighbor-Based Confidence Adjustment for 3D Rare Object Detection Using LiDAR

Abstract

Recent research on LiDAR-based 3D object detectors has shown strong performance; however, evaluations typically focus on dominant classes, overlooking rare classes, such as strollers, which could be critical in real autonomous driving scenarios. This oversight is problematic because state-of-the-art 3D object detectors show significantly lower performance on rare classes compared to dominant ones when trained on both. To address this issue and achieve accurate 3D rare object detection using only LiDAR data, we propose the Neighbor-Based confidence Adjustment for 3D rare class predictions (NBA3D). NBA3D utilizes a graph neural network to analyze the surrounding environment of rare class prediction boxes, enabling a more effective distinction between true positives and false positives based on their local context. Our approach utilizes both 3D prediction box characteristics and CLIP-based class semantic information to better contextualize neighboring objects. Various experiments demonstrate that NBA3D effectively improves the detection performance of rare class objects, regardless of the type of 3D object detectors used.