Simulating Automotive Radar with Lidar and Camera Inputs
Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System, Nankai University（机器人与自动信息系统研究所，南开大学）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics（天津智能机器人重点实验室）；TBI center, Nankai University（南开大学TBI中心）；Department of Robotics, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（人工智能 Mohamed Bin Zayed 大学机器人系）
Peili Song, Dezhen Song, Yifan Yang, Enfan Lan, Jingtai Liu
备注：
Accepted by 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Low-cost millimeter automotive radar has received more and more attention due to its ability to handle adverse weather and lighting conditions in autonomous driving. However, the lack of quality datasets hinders research and development. We report a new method that is able to simulate 4D millimeter wave radar signals including pitch, yaw, range, and Doppler velocity along with radar signal strength (RSS) using camera image, light detection and ranging (lidar) point cloud, and ego-velocity. The method is based on two new neural networks: 1) DIS-Net, which estimates the spatial distribution and number of radar signals, and 2) RSS-Net, which predicts the RSS of the signal based on appearance and geometric information. We have implemented and tested our method using open datasets from 3 different models of commercial automotive radar. The experimental results show that our method can successfully generate high-fidelity radar signals. Moreover, we have trained a popular object detection neural network with data augmented by our synthesized radar. The network outperforms the counterpart trained only on raw radar data, a promising result to facilitate future radar-based research and development.
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）；Sensorcortek Inc（森索科泰克公司）；Valeo（法雷奥公司）
Camera and Lidar processing have been revolutionized with the rapid development of deep learning model architectures. Automotive radar is one of the crucial elements of automated driver assistance and autonomous driving systems. Radar still relies on traditional signal processing techniques, unlike camera and Lidar based methods. We believe this is the missing link to achieve the most robust perception system. Identifying drivable space and occupied space is the first step in any autonomous decision making task. Occupancy grid map representation of the environment is often used for this purpos…
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院电信巴黎）
High quality perception is essential for autonomous driving (AD) systems. To reach the accuracy and robustness that are required by such systems, several types of sensors must be combined. Currently, mostly cameras and laser scanners (lidar) are deployed to build a representation of the world around the vehicle. While radar sensors have been used for a long time in the automotive industry, they are still under-used for AD despite their appealing characteristics (notably, their ability to measure the relative speed of obstacles and to operate even in adverse weather conditions). To a large exte…
Daimler AG（戴姆勒股份公司）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Institute for Information Processing Technology (ITIV)（信息处理技术研究所）
Lidar sensors are often used in mobile robots and autonomous vehicles to complement camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors for environment perception. Typically, perception algorithms are trained to only detect moving and static objects as well as ground estimation, but intentionally ignore weather effects to reduce false detections. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of automotive lidar performance under harsh weather conditions, i.e. heavy rain and dense fog. An extensive data set has been recorded for various fog and rain conditions, which is the basis for the conducted in-depth an…
ELMAR: Enhancing LiDAR Detection with 4D Radar Motion Awareness and Cross-modal Uncertainty
Infineon Technologies AG and the Technical University of Munich（英飞凌科技有限公司和技术大学慕尼黑）；China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学）；Technical University of Munich（技术大学慕尼黑）
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）
Radar sensors are gradually becoming a wide-spread equipment for road vehicles, playing a crucial role in autonomous driving and road safety. The broad adoption of radar sensors increases the chance of interference among sensors from different vehicles, generating corrupted range profiles and range-Doppler maps. In order to extract distance and velocity of multiple targets from range-Doppler maps, the interference affecting each range profile needs to be mitigated. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional neural network for automotive radar interference mitigation. In order to train our…
CLLAP: Contrastive Learning-based LiDAR-Augmented Pretraining for Enhanced Radar-Camera Fusion
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories（三菱电机研究实验室）
We consider the object recognition problem in autonomous driving using automotive radar sensors. Comparing to Lidar sensors, radar is cost-effective and robust in all-weather conditions for perception in autonomous driving. However, radar signals suffer from low angular resolution and precision in recognizing surrounding objects. To enhance the capacity of automotive radar, in this work, we exploit the temporal information from successive ego-centric bird-eye-view radar image frames for radar object recognition. We leverage the consistency of an object's existence and attributes (size, orienta…
New York University（纽约大学）；NXP Semiconductors（恩智浦半导体）
Among various sensors for assisted and autonomous driving systems, automotive radar has been considered as a robust and low-cost solution even in adverse weather or lighting conditions. With the recent development of radar technologies and open-sourced annotated data sets, semantic segmentation with radar signals has become very promising. However, existing methods are either computationally expensive or discard significant amounts of valuable information from raw 3D radar signals by reducing them to 2D planes via averaging. In this work, we introduce ERASE-Net, an Efficient RAdar SEgmentation…
Mercedes-Benz AG（梅赛德斯-奔驰股份公司）；University of Kassel（卡塞尔大学）
Radar-based road user detection is an important topic in the context of autonomous driving applications. The resolution of conventional automotive radar sensors results in a sparse data representation which is tough to refine during subsequent signal processing. On the other hand, a new sensor generation is waiting in the wings for its application in this challenging field. In this article, two sensors of different radar generations are evaluated against each other. The evaluation criterion is the performance on moving road user object detection and classification tasks. To this end, two data …
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）
In autonomous driving, radar systems play an important role in detecting targets such as other vehicles on the road. Radars mounted on different cars can interfere with each other, degrading the detection performance. Deep learning methods for automotive radar interference mitigation can succesfully estimate the amplitude of targets, but fail to recover the phase of the respective targets. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective technique based on unfolded robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) that is able to estimate both amplitude and phase in the presence of interference. …
Timely Fusion of Surround Radar/Lidar for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving Systems
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
There are various automotive applications that rely on correctly interpreting point cloud data recorded with radar sensors. We present a deep learning approach for histogram-based processing of such point clouds. Compared to existing methods, the design of our approach is extremely simple: it boils down to computing a point cloud histogram and passing it through a multi-layer perceptron. Our approach matches and surpasses state-of-the-art approaches on the task of automotive radar object type classification. It is also robust to noise that often corrupts radar measurements, and can deal with m…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；James Cook University（詹姆斯库克大学）；La Trobe University（乐卓博大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Vitalent Consulting（Vitalent咨询公司）；Silo AI
The automotive mmWave radar plays a key role in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. Deep learning-based instance segmentation enables real-time object identification from the radar detection points. In the conventional training process, accurate annotation is the key. However, high-quality annotations of radar detection points are challenging to achieve due to their ambiguity and sparsity. To address this issue, we propose a contrastive learning approach for implementing radar detection points-based instance segmentation. We define the positive and negative sample…
Guided Model-based LiDAR Super-Resolution for Resource-Efficient Automotive scene Segmentation
Industrial Systems Institute, Athena Research Center, Patras Science Park, Greece（工业系统研究所，亚特兰蒂斯研究中心，帕特拉科学公园，希腊）；AviSense.AI, Patras Science Park, Greece（AviSense.AI，帕特拉科学公园，希腊）
Autonomous radar has been an integral part of advanced driver assistance systems due to its robustness to adverse weather and various lighting conditions. Conventional automotive radars use digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms to process raw data into sparse radar pins that do not provide information regarding the size and orientation of the objects. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based algorithm for radar object detection. The algorithm takes in radar data in its raw tensor representation and places probabilistic oriented bounding boxes around the detected objects in bird's-e…
CLRNet: Targetless Extrinsic Calibration for Camera, Lidar and 4D Radar Using Deep Learning
Hungarian Research Network Institute for Computer Science and Control (HUN-REN SZTAKI)（匈牙利研究网络计算机科学与控制研究所）；Pázmány Péter Catholic University（帕兹曼·佩斯特天主教大学）；Intelligent Vehicles Group, TU Delft（智能车辆组，代尔夫特理工大学）；Perciv AI
Radar sensors are an important part of driver assistance systems and intelligent vehicles due to their robustness against all kinds of adverse conditions, e.g., fog, snow, rain, or even direct sunlight. This robustness is achieved by a substantially larger wavelength compared to light-based sensors such as cameras or lidars. As a side effect, many surfaces act like mirrors at this wavelength, resulting in unwanted ghost detections. In this article, we present a novel approach to detect these ghost objects by applying data-driven machine learning algorithms. For this purpose, we use a large-sca…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Sensor Cortek Inc.（Sensor Cortek公司）；Valeo（法雷奥）
In this work, we propose the use of radar with advanced deep segmentation models to identify open space in parking scenarios. A publically available dataset of radar observations called SCORP was collected. Deep models are evaluated with various radar input representations. Our proposed approach achieves low memory usage and real-time processing speeds, and is thus very well suited for embedded deployment.
Vitalent Consulting；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Automotive radar provides reliable environmental perception in all-weather conditions with affordable cost, but it hardly supplies semantic and geometry information due to the sparsity of radar detection points. With the development of automotive radar technologies in recent years, instance segmentation becomes possible by using automotive radar. Its data contain contexts such as radar cross section and micro-Doppler effects, and sometimes can provide detection when the field of view is obscured. The outcome from instance segmentation could be potentially used as the input of trackers for trac…
Automotive radar has increasingly attracted attention due to growing interest in autonomous driving technologies. Acquiring situational awareness using multimodal data collected at high sampling rates by various sensing devices including cameras, LiDAR, and radar requires considerable power, memory and compute resources which are often limited at an edge device. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive radar sub-sampling algorithm designed to identify regions that require more detailed/accurate reconstruction based on prior environmental conditions' knowledge, enabling near-optimal performan…
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；Infineon Technologies Austria AG（英飞凌科技奥地利股份公司）
Driver assistance systems as well as autonomous cars have to rely on sensors to perceive their environment. A heterogeneous set of sensors is used to perform this task robustly. Among them, radar sensors are indispensable because of their range resolution and the possibility to directly measure velocity. Since more and more radar sensors are deployed on the streets, mutual interference must be dealt with. In the so far unregulated automotive radar frequency band, a sensor must be capable of detecting, or even mitigating the harmful effects of interference, which include a decreased detection s…
Rigid Point Cloud Registration (PCR) algorithms aim to estimate the 6-DOF relative motion between two point clouds, which is important in various fields, including autonomous driving. Recent years have seen a significant improvement in global PCR algorithms, i.e. algorithms that can handle a large relative motion. This has been demonstrated in various scenarios, including indoor scenes, but has only been minimally tested in the Automotive setting, where point clouds are produced by vehicle-mounted LiDAR sensors. In this work, we aim to answer questions that are important for automotive applica…
MAN Truck & Bus SE（曼恩卡车与客车公司）；Volkswagen AG（大众汽车公司）
Highly automated driving functions currently often rely on a-priori knowledge from maps for planning and prediction in complex scenarios like cities. This makes map-relative localization an essential skill. In this paper, we address the problem of localization with automotive-grade radars, using a real-time graph-based SLAM approach. The system uses landmarks and odometry information as an abstraction layer. This way, besides radars, all kind of different sensor modalities including cameras and lidars can contribute. A single, semantic landmark map is used and maintained for all sensors. We im…
This paper presents an novel object type classification method for automotive applications which uses deep learning with radar reflections. The method provides object class information such as pedestrian, cyclist, car, or non-obstacle. The method is both powerful and efficient, by using a light-weight deep learning approach on reflection level radar data. It fills the gap between low-performant methods of handcrafted features and high-performant methods with convolutional neural networks. The proposed network exploits the specific characteristics of radar reflection data: It handles unordered …
Institute of Sensors, Signals and Systems, Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学传感器、信号与系统研究所）
Datasets for autonomous cars are essential for the development and benchmarking of perception systems. However, most existing datasets are captured with camera and LiDAR sensors in good weather conditions. In this paper, we present the RAdar Dataset In Adverse weaThEr (RADIATE), aiming to facilitate research on object detection, tracking and scene understanding using radar sensing for safe autonomous driving. RADIATE includes 3 hours of annotated radar images with more than 200K labelled road actors in total, on average about 4.6 instances per radar image. It covers 8 different categories of a…
Place recognition is critical for both offline mapping and online localization. However, current single-sensor based place recognition still remains challenging in adverse conditions. In this paper, a heterogeneous measurements based framework is proposed for long-term place recognition, which retrieves the query radar scans from the existing lidar maps. To achieve this, a deep neural network is built with joint training in the learning stage, and then in the testing stage, shared embeddings of radar and lidar are extracted for heterogeneous place recognition. To validate the effectiveness of …
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；SAIC Motor Technical Center（上汽集团技术中心）
Scene flow allows autonomous vehicles to reason about the arbitrary motion of multiple independent objects which is the key to long-term mobile autonomy. While estimating the scene flow from LiDAR has progressed recently, it remains largely unknown how to estimate the scene flow from a 4-D radar - an increasingly popular automotive sensor for its robustness against adverse weather and lighting conditions. Compared with the LiDAR point clouds, radar data are drastically sparser, noisier and in much lower resolution. Annotated datasets for radar scene flow are also in absence and costly to acqui…
The growing urban complexity demands an efficient algorithm to acquire and process various sensor information from autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to utilize object detection results from the image to adaptively sample and acquire radar data using Compressed Sensing (CS). This novel algorithm is motivated by the hypothesis that with a limited sampling budget, allocating more sampling budget to areas with the object as opposed to a uniform sampling ultimately improves relevant object detection performance. We improve detection performance by dynamically allocating …
We present an approach to automatically generate semantic labels for real recordings of automotive range-Doppler (RD) radar spectra. Such labels are required when training a neural network for object recognition from radar data. The automatic labeling approach rests on the simultaneous recording of camera and lidar data in addition to the radar spectrum. By warping radar spectra into the camera image, state-of-the-art object recognition algorithms can be applied to label relevant objects, such as cars, in the camera image. The warping operation is designed to be fully differentiable, which all…
We present a heterogeneous localization framework for solving radar global localization and pose tracking on pre-built lidar maps. To bridge the gap of sensing modalities, deep neural networks are constructed to create shared embedding space for radar scans and lidar maps. Herein learned feature embeddings are supportive for similarity measurement, thus improving map retrieval and data matching respectively. In RobotCar and MulRan datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework with the comparison to Scan Context and RaLL. In addition, the proposed pose tracking pipeline i…
Handong Global University（韩东国际大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
A misalignment of LiDAR as low as a few degrees could cause a significant error in obstacle detection and mapping that could cause safety and quality issues. In this paper, an accurate inspection system is proposed for estimating a LiDAR alignment error after sensor attachment on a mobility system such as a vehicle or robot. The proposed method uses only a single target board at the fixed position to estimate the three orientations (roll, tilt, and yaw) and the horizontal position of the LiDAR attachment with sub-degree and millimeter level accuracy. After the proposed preprocessing steps, the…
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨理工大学）；Infineon Technologies Austria AG（英飞凌科技奥地利股份公司）
Radar sensors are crucial for environment perception of driver assistance systems as well as autonomous vehicles. With a rising number of radar sensors and the so far unregulated automotive radar frequency band, mutual interference is inevitable and must be dealt with. Algorithms and models operating on radar data are required to run the early processing steps on specialized radar sensor hardware. This specialized hardware typically has strict resource-constraints, i.e. a low memory capacity and low computational power. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based approaches for denoising and inte…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Silkwave Holdings（Silkwave控股公司）
Millimeter-wave radars are being increasingly integrated into commercial vehicles to support new advanced driver-assistance systems by enabling robust and high-performance object detection, localization, as well as recognition - a key component of new environmental perception. In this paper, we propose a novel radar multiple-perspectives convolutional neural network (RAMP-CNN) that extracts the location and class of objects based on further processing of the range-velocity-angle (RVA) heatmap sequences. To bypass the complexity of 4D convolutional neural networks (NN), we propose to combine se…
