Domain Generalization of 3D Object Detection by Density-Resampling

Point-cloud-based 3D object detection suffers from performance degradation when encountering data with novel domain gaps. To tackle it, single-domain generalization (SDG) aims to generalize the detection model trained in a limited single source domain to perform robustly on unexplored domains. Through analysis of errors and missed detections in 3D point clouds, it has become evident that challenges predominantly arise from variations in point cloud density, especially the sparsity of point cloud data. Thus in this paper, we propose an SDG method centered around the theme of point cloud density resampling, which involves using data augmentation to simulate point clouds of different densities and developing a novel point cloud densification algorithm to enhance the detection accuracy of low-density point clouds. Specifically, our physical-aware density-resampling data augmentation (PDDA) is the first to consider the physical constraints on point density distribution in data augmentation, leading to a more realistic simulation of variation in cloud density. In systematic design, an auxiliary self-supervised point cloud densification task is incorporated into the detection framework, forming a basis for test-time model update. By manipulating point cloud density, our method not only increases the model's adaptability to point clouds of different densities but also allows the self-supervised densification algorithm to serve as a metric for assessing the model's understanding of the environment and semantic information. This, in turn, enables a test-time adjustment of the model to better adapt to varying domains. Extensive cross-dataset experiments covering "Car", "Pedestrian", and "Cyclist" detections demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art SDG methods and even overpass unsupervised domain adaptation methods under some circumstances. The code will be made publicly available.