Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data

While object recognition on 2D images is getting more and more mature, 3D understanding is eagerly in demand yet largely underexplored. In this paper, we study the 3D object detection problem from RGB-D data captured by depth sensors in both indoor and outdoor environments. Different from previous deep learning methods that work on 2D RGB-D images or 3D voxels, which often obscure natural 3D patterns and invariances of 3D data, we directly operate on raw point clouds by popping up RGB-D scans. Although recent works such as PointNet performs well for segmentation in small-scale point clouds, one key challenge is how to efficiently detect objects in large-scale scenes. Leveraging the wisdom of dimension reduction and mature 2D object detectors, we develop a Frustum PointNet framework that addresses the challenge. Evaluated on KITTI and SUN RGB-D 3D detection benchmarks, our method outperforms state of the arts by remarkable margins with high efficiency (running at 5 fps).