Multi-task multi-sensor fusion for three-dimensional object detection

Abstract

Provided are systems and methods that perform multi-task and/or multi-sensor fusion for three-dimensional object detection in furtherance of, for example, autonomous vehicle perception and control. In particular, according to one aspect of the present disclosure, example systems and methods described herein exploit simultaneous training of a machine-learned model ensemble relative to multiple related tasks to learn to perform more accurate multi-sensor 3D object detection. For example, the present disclosure provides an end-to-end learnable architecture with multiple machine-learned models that interoperate to reason about 2D and/or 3D object detection as well as one or more auxiliary tasks. According to another aspect of the present disclosure, example systems and methods described herein can perform multi-sensor fusion (e.g., fusing features derived from image data, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data, and/or other sensor modalities) at both the point-wise and region of interest (ROI)-wise level, resulting in fully fused feature representations.