Reflectance Prediction-based Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection in Compressed Point Clouds

Regarding intelligent transportation systems for vehicle networking, low-bitrate transmission via lossy point cloud compression is vital for facilitating real-time collaborative perception among vehicles with restricted bandwidth. In existing compression transmission systems, the sender lossily compresses point coordinates and reflectance to generate a transmission code stream, which faces transmission burdens from reflectance encoding and limited detection robustness due to information loss. To address these issues, this paper proposes a 3D object detection framework with reflectance prediction-based knowledge distillation (RPKD). We compress point coordinates while discarding reflectance during low-bitrate transmission, and feed the decoded non-reflectance compressed point clouds into a student detector. The discarded reflectance is then reconstructed by a geometry-based reflectance prediction (RP) module within the student detector for precise detection. A teacher detector with the same structure as student detector is designed for performing reflectance knowledge distillation (RKD) and detection knowledge distillation (DKD) from raw to compressed point clouds. Our RPKD framework jointly trains detectors on both raw and compressed point clouds to improve the student detector's robustness. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that our method can boost detection accuracy for compressed point clouds across multiple code rates. Notably, at a low code rate of 2.146 Bpp on the KITTI dataset, our RPKD-PV achieves the highest mAP of 73.6, outperforming existing detection methods with the PV-RCNN baseline.