Environmental perception with the multi-modal fusion is crucial in autonomous driving to increase accuracy, completeness, and robustness. This paper focuses on utilizing millimeter-wave (MMW) radar and camera sensor fusion for 3D object detection. A novel method that realizes the feature-level fusion under the bird's-eye view (BEV) for a better feature representation is proposed. Firstly, radar points are augmented with temporal accumulation and sent to a spatial-temporal encoder for radar feature extraction. Meanwhile, multi-scale image 2D features which adapt to various spatial scales are obtained by image backbone and neck model. Then, image features are transformed to BEV with the designed view transformer. In addition, this work fuses the multi-modal features with a two-stage fusion model called point-fusion and ROI-fusion, respectively. Finally, a detection head regresses objects category and 3D locations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method realizes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the most crucial detection metrics–mean average precision (mAP) and nuScenes detection score (NDS) on the challenging nuScenes dataset.

With the rapid development of automated vehicles (AVs), more and more demands are proposed towards environmental perception. Among the commonly used sensors, MMW radar plays an important role due to its low cost, adaptability In different weather, and motion detection capability. Radar can provide different data types to satisfy requirements for various levels of autonomous driving. The objective of this study is to present an overview of the state-of-the-art radar-based technologies applied In AVs. Although several published research papers focus on MMW Radars for intelligent vehicles, no general survey on deep learning applied In radar data for autonomous vehicles exists. Therefore, we try to provide related survey In this paper. First, we introduce models and representations from millimeter-wave (MMW) radar data. Secondly, we present radar-based applications used on AVs. For low-level automated driving, radar data have been widely used In advanced driving-assistance systems (ADAS). For high-level automated driving, radar data is used In object detection, object tracking, motion prediction, and self-localization. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and future development direction of related studies.

Environmental perception with the multi-modal fusion of radar and camera is crucial in autonomous driving to increase accuracy, completeness, and robustness. This paper focuses on utilizing millimeter-wave (MMW) radar and camera sensor fusion for 3D object detection. A novel method that realizes the feature-level fusion under the bird's-eye view (BEV) for a better feature representation is proposed. Firstly, radar points are augmented with temporal accumulation and sent to a spatial-temporal encoder for radar feature extraction. Meanwhile, multi-scale image 2D features which adapt to various spatial scales are obtained by image backbone and neck model. Then, image features are transformed to BEV with the designed view transformer. In addition, this work fuses the multi-modal features with a two-stage fusion model called point-fusion and ROI-fusion, respectively. Finally, a detection head regresses objects category and 3D locations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method realizes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the most crucial detection metrics-mean average precision (mAP) and nuScenes detection score (NDS) on the challenging nuScenes dataset.