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[Objective] With the rapid popularization of new energy vehicles and the vigorous development of autonomous driving technology, 3D object detection algorithms play a pivotal role in real road scenes. The LiDAR point clouds contain precise position and geometric structure information of the object, which can accurately describe the 3D space position of the target. Moreover, LiDAR makes environmental perception and route planning of unmanned vehicles a reality. However, cars in real scenes often fall into complex and difficult situations, such as occlusion and truncation of objects, which contribute to highly sparse clouds and incomplete contours. Therefore, the effective use of disordered and unevenly distributed point clouds for accurate 3D object detection has important research significance and practical value for the safety of autonomous driving. [Methods] This paper uses LiDAR point clouds in an autonomous driving scene to conduct in-depth research on a high-performance 3D object detection algorithm based on deep learning. The 3D object detection algorithm based on multibranch feature fusion (PSANet) is designed to improve the capacity and viability of autonomous driving technology. After the disordered point clouds are divided into regular voxels, the voxel feature coding module and convolutional neural network are used to learn the voxel features, and the sparse 3D data are compressed into a dense 2D bird's-eye view. Furthermore, the multiscale bird's-eye view features are deeply fused through the coarse and fine branches of the 2D backbone network. The splitting and aggregation feature pyramid module in the fine branch splits and aggregates the bird's-eye view features at different levels and realizes the deep fusion of semantic information, texture information, and context information of multiscale features to obtain more expressive features. The multiscale features in the coarse branch are fused after transposed convolution, and the precise original spatial location information is preserved. After the feature extraction of coarse and fine branches, the element-wise addition method can obtain more accurate and complete features for object classification, position regression, and orientation prediction. [Results] The experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that the average precision of PSANet in 3D object detection and bird's-eye view object detection tasks reach 81.72% and 88.25%, respectively. The inference speed on a single GTX 1080Ti GPU can reach 24 frames per second, and it shows strong robustness in complex scenes. Compared with the two-stage target detection algorithms MV3D, AVOD-FPN, F-PointNet, and IPOD, the average accuracy of 3D target detection of this algorithm increased by 18.21%, 5.89%, 8.94%, and 3.12%, respectively. Compared with the one-stage target detection algorithms VoxelNet, SECOND, PointPillars, and VoTr-SSD, the average accuracy of 3D target detection of this algorithm increased by 11.63%, 4.05%, 3.19%, 0.98%, 1.16%, and 0.7%, respectively. The detection speed of this algorithm improved by 14 frames per second compared with the two-stage algorithm PointRCNN with similar accuracy. [Conclusions] In comparison with other advanced algorithms, this algorithm exhibits strong performance, in which it can better balance the accuracy and speed of target detection in autonomous driving scenarios. Higher accuracy is required in the algorithm, whether one- or two-stage, for novel applications. The method with the highest efficiency must be used in an autonomous car. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, detection and three-dimensional (3D) imaging of lightning plasma channels are presented using radar interferometry. Experiments were carried out in Leshan, China with a 48.2 MHz VHF radar configured with an interferometric antenna array. The typical characteristics of lightning echoes are studied in the form of amplitude, phase, and doppler spectra derived from the raw in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) data. In addition, the 3D structure of lightning channels is reconstructed using the interferometry technique. The localization results of lightning are verified with the locating results of lightning detection networks operating at VLF ranges, which indicate the feasibility of using VHF radar for lightning mapping. The interpretation of the observational results is complicated by the dendric structure of lightning channel and the overlap between passive electromagnetic radiations and return echoes. Nevertheless, some parts of the characteristics of lightning are still evident. The observational result of return echoes shows good consistency with the overdense assumption of lightning channels. The transition from the overdense channel to the underdense channel in the form of amplitude and phase is clearly observed. This technique is very promising to reveal the typical characteristics of lightning return echoes and structure of lightning propagation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D object detection in LiDAR point clouds has been extensively used in autonomous driving, intelligent robotics, and augmented reality. Although the one-stage 3D detector has satisfactory training and inference speed, there are still some performance problems due to insufficient utilization of bird's eye view (BEV) information. In this paper, a new backbone network is proposed to complete the cross-layer fusion of multi-scale BEV feature maps, which makes full use of various information for detection. Specifically, our proposed backbone network can be divided into a coarse branch and a fine branch. In the coarse branch, we use the pyramidal feature hierarchy (PFH) to generate multi-scale BEV feature maps, which retain the advantages of different levels and serves as the input of the fine branch. In the fine branch, our proposed pyramid splitting and aggregation (PSA) module deeply integrates different levels of multi-scale feature maps, thereby improving the expressive ability of the final features. Extensive experiments on the challenging KITTI-3D benchmark show that our method has better performance in both 3D and BEV object detection compared with some previous state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results with average precision (AP) prove the effectiveness of our network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-dimensional object detection from point cloud data is becoming more and more significant, especially for autonomous driving applications. However, it is difficult for lidar to obtain the complete structure of an object in a real scene due to its scanning characteristics. Although the existing methods have made great progress, most of them ignore the prior information of object structure, such as symmetry. So, in this paper, we use the symmetry of the object to complete the missing part in the point cloud and then detect it. Specifically, we propose a two-stage detection framework. In the first stage, we adopt an encoder–decoder structure to generate the symmetry points of the foreground points and make the symmetry points and the non-empty voxel centers form an enhanced point cloud. In the second stage, the enhanced point cloud is input into the baseline, which is an anchor-based region proposal network, to generate the detection results. Extensive experiments on the challenging KITTI benchmark show the effectiveness of our method, which has better performance on both 3D and BEV (bird's eye view) object detection compared with some previous state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]