Exploring Geometry-aware Contrast and Clustering Harmonization for Self-supervised 3D Object Detection.

Current 3D object detection paradigms highly rely on extensive annotation efforts, which makes them not practical in many real-world industrial applications. Inspired by that a human driver can keep accumulating experiences from self-exploring the roads without any tutor's guidance, we first step forwards to explore a simple yet effective self-supervised learning framework tailored for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Although the self-supervised pipeline has achieved great success in 2D domain, the characteristic challenges (e.g., complex geometry structure and various 3D object views) encountered in the 3D domain hinder the direct adoption of existing techniques that often contrast the 2D augmented data or cluster single-view features. Here we present a novel self-supervised 3D Object detection framework that seamlessly integrates the geometry-aware contrast and clustering harmonization to lift the unsupervised 3D representation learning, named GCC-3D. First, GCC-3D introduces a Geometric-Aware Contrastive objective to learn spatial-sensitive local structure representation. This objective enforces the spatially-closed voxels to have high feature similarity. Second, a Pseudo-Instance Clustering harmonization mechanism is proposed to encourage that different views of pseudo-instances should have consistent similarities to clustering prototype centers. This module endows our model semantic discriminative capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate our GCC-3D achieves significant performance improvement on data-efficient 3D object detection benchmarks (nuScenes and Waymo). Moreover, our GCC-3D framework can achieve state-of-the art performances on all popular 3D object detection benchmarks.