Hardware-software implementation of the PointPillars network for 3D object detection in point clouds

In this paper, we present a hardware-software implementation of a deep neural network for object detection based on a point cloud obtained by a LiDAR sensor. The Brevitas / PyTorch tools were used for network quantisation and the FINN tool for hardware implementation in the reprogrammable Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC device. The PointPillars network was used in the research, as it is a reasonable compromise between detection accuracy and calculation complexity. The obtained results show that quite a significant computation precision limitation along with a few network architecture simplifications allows the solution to be implemented on an heterogeneous embedded platform with reasonable detection accuracy.