Khái niệm cốt lõi
The proposed CRKD framework enables effective knowledge distillation from a high-performing LiDAR-camera teacher detector to a camera-radar student detector, bridging the performance gap between the two sensor configurations.
Tóm tắt
The paper proposes CRKD, a novel cross-modality knowledge distillation framework that distills knowledge from a LiDAR-camera (LC) teacher detector to a camera-radar (CR) student detector for 3D object detection in autonomous driving.
Key highlights:
- CRKD leverages the shared Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature space to enable effective knowledge transfer between the LC teacher and CR student.
- Four novel distillation losses are designed to address the significant domain gap between the LC and CR modalities, including cross-stage radar distillation, mask-scaling feature distillation, relation distillation, and response distillation.
- An adaptive gated network is introduced to the baseline CR detector to learn the relative importance between camera and radar features.
- Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of CRKD, with the CR student model outperforming existing baselines by a large margin.
The paper highlights the importance of exploring the fusion-to-fusion knowledge distillation path to leverage the strengths of both high-performing LC detectors and the cost-effective CR sensor configuration.
Thống kê
LiDAR and camera are relatively high-cost, which hinders the wide adoption of the top-performing LC sensor configuration for consumer vehicles.
Radar is robust to varying weather and lighting conditions, features automotive-grade design, and is already highly accessible on most cars equipped with driver assistance features.
Compared to LiDAR, radar measurements are sparse and noisy, making the design of CR detectors challenging.
Trích dẫn
"We propose CRKD: an enhanced Camera-Radar 3D object detector with cross-modality Knowledge Distillation (Fig. 1) that distills knowledge from an LC teacher detector to a CR student detector."
"To our best knowledge, CRKD is the first KD framework that supports a fusion-to-fusion distillation path."