Spe-BEVHead: Rethinking the Detection Head Design for Bird's-Eye-View Object Detection

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) detection has become a dominant paradigm for 3D object detection in autonomous driving, due to its strong perception capability. However, most existing methods mainly focus on constructing high-quality BEV feature representations, while neglecting the design of task-specific detection heads. In practice, they directly adopt the center-based head originally developed for 2D detection, without any specific optimization. This leads to three inherent limitations: (i) a geometric mismatch between the Gaussian kernel used for classification and the real BEV object, (ii) degraded end-to-end performance without Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), and (iii) sparse supervisory signals. To address these issues, we propose Spe-BEVHead, a detection head specifically tailored for BEV 3D object detection. Spe-BEVHead introduces three BEV-specific adaptations: (1) a Rotated Box Kernel that generates geometry-aligned classification weights, (2) a Local Response Refinement Module (LRRM) that suppresses non-peak responses and improves end-to-end performance, and (3) a dual-branch architecture that provides richer supervisory signals to promote more robust learning while inherently preserving the performance for end-to-end inference. Extensive experiments show that Spe-BEVHead can be seamlessly integrated into existing BEV backbones, delivering direct performance gains while retaining competitive performance under the challenging end-to-end setting.