Clusterformer: Cluster-based Transformer for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds

Attributed to the unstructured and sparse nature of point clouds, the transformer shows greater potential in point clouds data processing. However, the recent query-based 3D detectors usually project the features acquired from a sparse backbone into the structured and compact Bird's Eye View(BEV) plane before adopting the transformer, which destroys the sparsity of features, introducing empty tokens and additional resource consumption for the transformer. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel query-based 3D detector called Clusterformer, our Clusterformer regards each object as a cluster of 3D space which mainly consists of the non-empty voxels belonging to the same object, and leverages the cluster to conduct the transformer decoder to generate the proposals from the sparse voxel features directly. Such cluster-based transformer structure can effectively improve the performance and convergence speed of query-based detectors by making use of the object prior information contained in the clusters. Additionally, we introduce a Query2Key strategy to enhance the key and value features with the object-level information iteratively in our cluster-based transformer structure. Experimental results show that the proposed Clusterformer outperforms the previous query-based detectors with a lower latency and memory usage, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo Open Datasets and KITTI Datasets.