Analysis of TempDistiller: Improving Efficiency in Bird’s-Eye-View 3D Object Detection
In the field of bird’s-eye-view (BEV) 3D object detection, achieving a balance between precision and efficiency is a significant challenge. While previous camera-based BEV methods have shown remarkable performance by incorporating long-term temporal information, they often suffer from low efficiency. To address this issue, the authors propose TempDistiller, a Temporal knowledge Distiller, that leverages knowledge distillation to acquire long-term memory from a teacher detector with a limited number of frames.
The key innovation of TempDistiller lies in its ability to reconstruct long-term temporal knowledge through a self-attention operation applied to feature teachers. By integrating this reconstructed knowledge into the student detector, the method aims to provide more accurate and efficient object detection in BEV scenarios.
The proposed TempDistiller utilizes a generator to produce novel features for masked student features based on the reconstruction target obtained from the teacher detector’s long-term memory. By reconstructing the student features using this target, the method enhances the student model’s ability to capture and understand temporal information.
In addition to focusing on spatial features, TempDistiller also explores temporal relational knowledge when inputting full frames for the student model. This multi-modal approach allows the student model to leverage both spatial and temporal cues, contributing to improved performance in BEV object detection tasks.
The authors evaluate the effectiveness of TempDistiller on the nuScenes benchmark dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an enhancement of +1.6 mean Average Precision (mAP) and +1.1 Normalized Detection Score (NDS) compared to the baseline. Additionally, TempDistiller achieves a speed improvement of approximately 6 frames per second (FPS) after compressing temporal knowledge. Furthermore, the method also demonstrates superior accuracy in velocity estimation.
Overall, TempDistiller offers a promising solution to the challenge of balancing precision and efficiency in BEV 3D object detection. By distilling long-term temporal knowledge from a teacher detector and incorporating it into a student model, the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements. Furthermore, the exploration of temporal relational knowledge and the efficient compression of temporal knowledge add to the method’s efficiency gains. TempDistiller has the potential to advance the field of BEV object detection and pave the way for more efficient and accurate systems in real-world applications.