Fade3D: Fast and Deployable 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

3D object detection is an essential scene perception capability for autonomous vehicles. In intelligent transportation systems, autonomous vehicles require minimal inference latency to sense their surroundings in real-time. However, advanced 3D detection methods often suffer from high inference latency. This limits the real-time deployment of 3D detection models in the real world. To address this problem, this paper proposes a fast and deployable 3D object detection method from the LiDAR point cloud for autonomous driving, named Fade3D. Firstly, we propose a Lightweight Input Encoder (LIE) to extract the most critical features from point clouds. Then, we develop a Spatial Feature Enhancement BEV backbone (SFENet) that efficiently encodes geometry features into compact representations. Additionally, we design an IoU-aware Loss Re-weighting (ILR) that enhances performance by shifting more attention to hard samples. Leveraging LIE and SFENet, our approach is independent of point cloud density and number, achieving significant speed advantages in processing large-scale point clouds and being deployment-friendly. Extensive experiments on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) datasets comparing various baseline detectors demonstrate its universality and superiority. Specifically, our method demonstrates impressive real-time inference capabilities, achieving 51.5 Hz on an RTX3090 GPU and 12.4 Hz on a Jetson Orin embedded development board. Code will be available at https://github.com/wayyeah/Fade3D