LISO: Lidar-only Self-Supervised 3D Object Detection

Abstract: 3D object detection is one of the most important components in any Self-Driving stack, but current state-of-the-art (SOTA) lidar object detectors require costly & slow manual annotation of 3D bounding boxes to perform well. Recently, several methods emerged to generate pseudo ground truth without human supervision, however, all of these methods have various drawbacks: Some methods require sensor rigs with full camera coverage and accurate calibration, partly supplemented by an auxiliary optical flow engine. Others require expensive high-precision localization to find objects that disappeared over multiple drives. We introduce a novel self-supervised method to train SOTA lidar object detection networks which works on unlabeled sequences of lidar point clouds only, which we call trajectory-regularized self-training. It utilizes a SOTA self-supervised lidar scene flow network under the hood to generate, track, and iteratively refine pseudo ground truth. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for multiple SOTA object detection networks across multiple real-world datasets. Code will be released.