Low-level Sensor Fusion Network for 3D Vehicle Detection using Radar Range-Azimuth Heatmap and Monocular Image
Jinhyeong Kim ( Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Youngseok Kim (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST))*, Dongsuk Kum (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Keywords: Recognition: Feature Detection, Indexing, Matching, and Shape Representation
                Abstract:
                Robust  and accurate object detection on roads with various objects is essential for  automated driving. The radar has been employed in commercial advanced driver  assistance systems (ADAS) for a decade due to its low-cost and  high-reliability advantages. However, the radar has been used only in limited  driving conditions such as highways to detect a few forwarding vehicles  because of the limited performance of radar due to low resolution or poor  classification. We propose a learning-based detection network using radar  range-azimuth heatmap and monocular image in order to fully exploit the radar  in complex road environments. We show that radar-image fusion can overcome  the inherent weakness of the radar by leveraging camera information. Our  proposed network has a two-stage architecture that combines radar and image  feature representations rather than fusing each sensor's prediction results  to improve detection performance over a single sensor. To demonstrate the  effectiveness of the proposed method, we collected radar, camera, and LiDAR  data in various driving environments in terms of vehicle speed, lighting  conditions, and traffic volume. Experimental results show that the proposed  fusion method outperforms the radar-only and the image-only method.