Development Blog

Generating 3D Bounding Boxes with 2D Object Detection

Current object detection algorithms are capable of generating axis-aligned bounding boxes for 2D images. However, such a technique does not currently exist for 3D objects. Although 2D object detection can be performed on a scene viewed from a specific point, it cannot generate a 3D axis-aligned bounding box containing the specified objects. With the growth of artificial intelligence, performing detection on 3D objects within a scene offers countless potential uses. We propose a technique to generate 3D axis-aligned bounding boxes for 3D objects stored as a triangle mesh by performing 2D object detection on the scene viewed from a variety of angles and then assigning triangles to the detected categories using ray-tracing on a BSP (binary space partitioning) tree constructed from the scene.