CoIn: Contrastive Instance Feature Mining for Outdoor 3D Object Detection with Very Limited Annotations

Recently, 3D object detection with sparse annotations has received great attention. However, current detectors usually perform poorly under very limited annotations. To address this problem, we propose a novel Contrastive Instance feature mining method, named CoIn. To better identify indistinguishable features learned through limited supervision, we design a Multi-Class contrastive learning module (MCcont) to enhance feature discrimination. Meanwhile, we propose a feature-level pseudo-label mining framework consisting of an instance feature mining module (InF-Mining) and a Labeled-to-Pseudo contrastive learning module (LPcont). These two modules exploit latent instances in feature space to supervise the training of detectors with limited annotations. Extensive experiments with KITTI dataset, Waymo open dataset, and nuScenes dataset show that under limited annotations, our method greatly improves the performance of baseline detectors: CenterPoint, Voxel-RCNN, and CasA. Combining CoIn with an iterative training strategy, we propose a CoIn++ pipeline, which requires only 2% annotations in the KITTI dataset to achieve performance comparable to the fully supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xmuqimingxia/CoIn.