MonoCLUE: Object-Aware Clustering Enhances Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection offers a cost-effective solution for autonomous driving, but it suffers from the ill-posed depth and a limited field of view. These constraints lead to the lack of geometric cues and reduced accuracy in occluded or truncated scenes. While recent approaches incorporate additional depth information to address geometric ambiguity, they overlook the importance of visual cues essential for robust object recognition. In this paper, we propose MonoCLUE that enhances monocular 3D detection by leveraging both local clustering and generalized scene memory of visual features. First, we perform K-means clustering on visual features to capture distinct object-level appearance visual parts (e.g., bonnet, car roof), which improves the detection of partially visible objects. The clustered features are then propagated across the entire region to capture objects with similar appearances. Second, we construct a generalized scene memory by aggregating clustered features across images, providing consistent appearance representations that generalize scenes. This improves the consistency of object-level features, enabling stable detection across varying environments. Lastly, we integrate both local cluster features and generalized scene memory into object queries, guiding attention toward informative regions in the feature map. Exploiting an unified local clustering and generalized scene memory strategy, MonoCLUE enables robust monocular 3D detection under occlusion and limited visibility. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark.