  High-efficiency point cloud 3D object detection operated on embedded systems
is important for many robotics applications including autonomous driving. Most
previous works try to solve it using anchor-based detection methods which come
with two drawbacks: post-processing is relatively complex and computationally
expensive; tuning anchor parameters is tricky. We are the first to address
these drawbacks with an anchor free and Non-Maximum Suppression free one stage
detector called AFDet. The entire AFDet can be processed efficiently on a CNN
accelerator or a GPU with the simplified post-processing. Without bells and
whistles, our proposed AFDet performs competitively with other one stage
anchor-based methods on KITTI validation set and Waymo Open Dataset validation
set.
