BEVNeXt: Reviving Dense BEV Frameworks for 3D Object Detection

Zhenxin Li, Shiyi Lan, José M. Álvarez, Zuxuan Wu

Abstract: Recently, the rise of query-based Transformer decoders is reshaping camera-based 3D object detection. These query-based decoders are surpassing the traditional dense BEV (Bird's Eye View)-based methods. However, we argue that dense BEV frameworks remain important due to their out-standing abilities in depth estimation and object localization, depicting 3D scenes accurately and comprehensively. This paper aims to address the drawbacks of the existing dense BEV-based 3D object detectors by introducing our proposed enhanced components, including a CRF-modulated depth estimation module enforcing object-level consistencies, a long-term temporal aggregation module with extended receptive fields, and a two-stage object decoder combining perspective techniques with CRF-modulated depth embedding. These enhancements lead to a “modernized” dense BEV framework dubbed BEVNeXt. On the nuScenes benchmark, BEVNeXt outperforms both BEV-based and query-based frameworks under various settings, achieving a state-of-the-art result of 64.2 NDS on the nuScenes test set.