  Object detection in 3D point clouds is a crucial task in a range of computer
vision applications including robotics, autonomous cars, and augmented reality.
This work addresses the object detection task in 3D point clouds using a highly
efficient, surface-biased, feature extraction method (wang2022rbgnet), that
also captures contextual cues on multiple levels. We propose a 3D object
detector that extracts accurate feature representations of object candidates
and leverages self-attention on point patches, object candidates, and on the
global scene in 3D scene. Self-attention is proven to be effective in encoding
correlation information in 3D point clouds by (xie2020mlcvnet). While other 3D
detectors focus on enhancing point cloud feature extraction by selectively
obtaining more meaningful local features (wang2022rbgnet) where contextual
information is overlooked. To this end, the proposed architecture uses
ray-based surface-biased feature extraction and multi-level context encoding to
outperform the state-of-the-art 3D object detector. In this work, 3D detection
experiments are performed on scenes from the ScanNet dataset whereby the
self-attention modules are introduced one after the other to isolate the effect
of self-attention at each level.
