LET-3D-AP: Longitudinal Error Tolerant 3D Average Precision for Camera-Only 3D Detection

The popular object detection metric 3D Average Precision (3D AP) relies on the intersection over union between predicted bounding boxes and ground truth bounding boxes. However, depth estimation based on cameras has limited accuracy, which may cause otherwise reasonable predictions that suffer from such longitudinal localization errors to be treated as false positives and false negatives. We therefore propose variants of the popular 3D AP metric that are designed to be more permissive with respect to depth estimation errors. Specifically, our novel longitudinal error tolerant metrics, LET-3D-AP and LET-3D-APL, allow longitudinal localization errors of the predicted bounding boxes up to a given tolerance. The proposed metrics have been used in the Waymo Open Dataset 3D Camera-Only Detection Challenge. We believe that they will facilitate advances in the field of camera-only 3D detection by providing more informative performance signals.