# Open-set 3D Object Detection

Source: [Open-set 3D Object Detection](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6b621e209131cea2dec7>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:47:07.195Z

Authors: Jun Cen, Peng Yun, Junhao Cai, Michael Yu Wang, Ming Liu

Published: 2021-12-02T11:18:03.000Z

## Abstract

3D object detection has been wildly studied in recent years, especially for robot perception systems. However, existing 3D object detection is under a closed-set condition, meaning that the network can only output boxes of trained classes. Unfortunately, this closed-set condition is not robust enough for practical use, as it will identify unknown objects as known by mistake. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an open-set 3D object detector, which aims to (1) identify known objects, like the closed-set detection, and (2) identify unknown objects and give their accurate bounding boxes. Specifically, we divide the open-set 3D object detection problem into two steps: (1) finding out the regions containing the unknown objects with high probability and (2) enclosing the points of these regions with proper bounding boxes. The first step is solved by the finding that unknown objects are often classified as known objects with low confidence, and we show that the Euclidean distance sum based on metric learning is a better confidence score than the naive softmax probability to differentiate unknown objects from known objects. On this basis, unsupervised clustering is used to refine the bounding boxes of unknown objects. The proposed method combining metric learning and unsupervised clustering is called the MLUC network. Our experiments show that our MLUC network achieves state-of-the-art performance and can identify both known and unknown objects as expected.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Open-set 3D Object Detection on KITTI (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/open-set-3d-object-detection-on-kitti-test.md>): Open-set 3D Object Detection; KITTI (test); AP (Unknown): 9.7.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01135>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.01135.pdf>)