Robustness-Aware 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving: A Review and Outlook

In the realm of modern autonomous driving, the perception system is indispensable for accurately assessing the state of the surrounding environment, thereby enabling informed prediction and planning. Key to this system is 3D object detection methods, that utilize vehicle-mounted sensors such as LiDAR and cameras to identify the size, category, and location of nearby objects. Despite the surge in 3D object detection methods aimed at enhancing detection precision and efficiency, there is a gap in the literature that systematically examines their resilience against environmental variations, noise, and weather changes. This study emphasizes the importance of robustness, alongside accuracy and latency, in evaluating perception systems under practical scenarios. Our work presents an extensive survey of camera-based, LiDAR-based, and multimodal 3D object detection algorithms, thoroughly evaluating their trade-off between accuracy, latency, and robustness, particularly on datasets like KITTI-C and nuScenes-C to ensure fair comparisons. Among these,multimodal 3D detection approaches exhibit superior robustness and a novel taxonomy is introduced to reorganize its literature for enhanced clarity. This survey aims to offer a more practical perspective on the current capabilities and constraints of 3D object detection algorithms in real-world applications, thus steering future research towards robustness-centric advancements