  In autonomous driving and robotics, there is a growing interest in utilizing
short-term historical data to enhance multi-camera 3D object detection,
leveraging the continuous and correlated nature of input video streams. Recent
work has focused on spatially aligning BEV-based features over timesteps.
However, this is often limited as its gain does not scale well with long-term
past observations. To address this, we advocate for supervising a model to
predict objects' poses given past observations, thus explicitly guiding to
learn objects' temporal cues. To this end, we propose a model called DAP
(Detection After Prediction), consisting of a two-branch network: (i) a branch
responsible for forecasting the current objects' poses given past observations
and (ii) another branch that detects objects based on the current and past
observations. The features predicting the current objects from branch (i) is
fused into branch (ii) to transfer predictive knowledge. We conduct extensive
experiments with the large-scale nuScenes datasets, and we observe that
utilizing such predictive information significantly improves the overall
detection performance. Our model can be used plug-and-play, showing consistent
performance gain.
