Zhixiong Ma

Dr. Zhixiong Ma

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

6Years (2021-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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29 May 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
LZLianqing Zheng
Lianqing Zheng
SLSen Li
Sen Li
TBtan bin
tan bin
LYLong Yang
Long Yang
SCSihan Chen
Sihan Chen
ZMZhixiong Ma
Zhixiong Ma
Camera and millimeter-wave (MMW) radar fusion is essential for accurate and robust autonomous driving systems. With the advancement of radar technology, next-generation high-resolution automotive radar, i.e., 4D radar, has emerged. In addition to the target range, azimuth, and Doppler velocity measurements of traditional radar, 4D radar provides elevation measurement to create a denser “point cloud.” In this study, we propose a camera and 4D radar fusion network called RCFusion, which achieves multimodal feature fusion under a unified bird’s-eye view (BEV) space to accomplish 3D object detection tasks. In the camera stream, multi-scale feature maps are obtained by the image backbone and feature pyramid network; they are then converted into orthographic feature maps by an orthographic feature transform. Next, enhanced and fine-grained image BEV features are obtained via a designed shared attention encoder. Meanwhile, in the 4D radar stream, a newly designed component named Radar PillarNet efficiently encodes the radar features to generate radar pseudo-images, which are fed into the point cloud backbone to create radar BEV features. An interactive attention module is proposed for the fusion stage, which outputs a valid fusion of the two-modal BEV features. Finally, a generic detection head predicts the object classes and locations. The proposed RCFusion is validated on the TJ4DRadSet and View-of-Delft datasets. The experimental results and analysis show that the proposed method can effectively fuse camera and 4D radar features to achieve robust detection performance.

9 November 2022 in IEEE Sensors Journal
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
BTBin Tan
Bin Tan
ZMZhixiong Ma
Zhixiong Ma
XZXichan Zhu
Xichan Zhu
SLSen Li
Sen Li
LZLianqing Zheng
Lianqing Zheng
JBJie Bai
Jie Bai
Object detection is a crucial task in autonomous driving. Currently, object-detection methods for autonomous driving systems are primarily based on information from cameras and lidar, which may experience interference from complex lighting or poor weather. At present, the four-dimensional (4D) (x, y, z, v) millimeter-wave radar can provide a denser point cloud to achieve 3D object-detection tasks that are difficult to complete with traditional millimeter-wave radar. Existing 3D object point-cloud detection algorithms are mostly based on 3D lidar, these methods are not necessarily applicable to millimeter-wave radars, which have sparser data and more noise and include velocity information. This study proposes a 3D object-detection framework based on a multi-frame 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud. First, the ego vehicle velocity information is estimated by the millimeter-wave radar, and the relative velocity information of the millimeter-wave radar point cloud is compensated to the absolute velocity. Second, by matching between millimeter-wave radar frames, the multi-frame millimeter-wave radar point cloud is matched to the last frame. Finally, the object is detected by the proposed multi-frame millimeter-wave radar point cloud detection network. Experiments are performed using our newly recorded TJ4DRadSet dataset in a complex traffic environment. The results showed that the proposed object-detection framework outperformed the comparison methods based on the 3D mean average precision. The experimental results and methods can be used as the baseline for other multi-frame 4D millimeter-wave radar detection algorithms.

22 January 2026 in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
LZLianqing Zheng
Lianqing Zheng
JLJianan Liu
Jianan Liu
Runwei GuanRunwei Guan
Runwei Guan
LYLong Yang
Long Yang
SLShouyi Lu
Shouyi Lu
XZXichan Zhu
Xichan Zhu
3D object detection and occupancy prediction are critical tasks in autonomous driving, attracting significant attention. Despite the potential of recent vision-based methods, they encounter challenges under adverse conditions. Thus, integrating cameras with next-generation 4D imaging radar to achieve unified multi-task perception is highly significant, though research in this domain remains limited. In this paper, we propose Doracamom, the first framework that fuses multi-view cameras and 4D radar for joint 3D object detection and semantic occupancy prediction, enabling comprehensive environmental perception. Specifically, we introduce a novel Coarse Voxel Queries Generator that integrates geometric priors from 4D radar with semantic features from images to initialize voxel queries, establishing a robust foundation for subsequent Transformer-based refinement. To leverage temporal information, we design a Dual-Branch Temporal Encoder that processes multi-modal temporal features in parallel across BEV and voxel spaces, enabling comprehensive spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-Modal BEV-Voxel Fusion module that adaptively fuses complementary features through attention mechanisms while employing auxiliary tasks to enhance feature quality. Extensive experiments on the OmniHD-Scenes, View-of-Delft (VoD), and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate that Doracamom achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tasks, establishing new benchmarks for multi-modal 3D perception. Code and models can be available at https: //github.com/TJRadarLab/Doracamom.

3 June 2023 in Remote Sensing
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
TBtan bin
tan bin
ZMZhixiong Ma
Zhixiong Ma
XZXichan Zhu
Xichan Zhu
SLSen Li
Sen Li
LZLianqing Zheng
Lianqing Zheng
JBJie Bai
Jie Bai
This paper presents a target tracking algorithm based on 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud information for autonomous driving applications, which addresses the limitations of traditional 2 + 1D radar systems by using higher resolution target point cloud information that enables more accurate motion state estimation and target contour information. The proposed algorithm includes several steps, starting with the estimation of the ego vehicle’s velocity information using the radial velocity information of the millimeter-wave radar point cloud. Different clustering suggestions are then obtained using a density-based clustering method, and correlation regions of the targets are obtained based on these clustering suggestions. The binary Bayesian filtering method is then used to determine whether the targets are dynamic or static targets based on their distribution characteristics. For dynamic targets, Kalman filtering is used to estimate and update the state of the target using trajectory and velocity information, while for static targets, the rolling ball method is used to estimate and update the shape contour boundary of the target. Unassociated measurements are estimated for the contour and initialized for the trajectory, and unassociated trajectory targets are selectively retained and deleted. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using real data. Overall, the proposed target tracking algorithm based on 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud information has the potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of target tracking in autonomous driving applications, providing more comprehensive motion state and target contour information for better decision making.

11 February 2026 in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
LZLianqing Zheng
Lianqing Zheng
LYLong Yang
Long Yang
QLQunshu Lin
Qunshu Lin
WAWenjin Ai
Wenjin Ai
MLMinghao Liu
Minghao Liu
XZXichan Zhu
Xichan Zhu
The rapid advancement of deep learning has intensified the need for comprehensive data for use by autonomous driving algorithms. High-quality datasets are crucial for the development of effective data-driven autonomous driving solutions. Next-generation autonomous driving datasets must be multimodal, incorporating data from advanced sensors that feature extensive data coverage, detailed annotations, and diverse scene representation. To address this need, we present OmniHD-Scenes, a large-scale multimodal dataset that provides comprehensive omnidirectional high-definition data. The OmniHD-Scenes dataset combines data from 128-beam LiDAR, six cameras, and six 4D imaging radar systems to achieve full environmental perception. The dataset comprises 1501 clips, each approximately 30-s long, totaling more than 450 K synchronized frames and more than 5.85 million synchronized sensor data points. We also propose a novel 4D annotation pipeline. To date, we have annotated 200 clips with more than 514 K precise 3D bounding boxes. These clips also include semantic segmentation annotations for static scene elements. Additionally, we introduce a novel automated pipeline for generation of the dense occupancy ground truth, which effectively leverages information from non-key frames. Alongside the proposed dataset, we establish comprehensive evaluation metrics, baseline models, and benchmarks for 3D detection and semantic occupancy prediction. These benchmarks utilize surround-view cameras and 4D imaging radar to explore cost-effective sensor solutions for autonomous driving applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our low-cost sensor configuration and its robustness under adverse conditions.

26 September 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
SCSihan Chen
Sihan Chen
LZLianqing Zheng
Lianqing Zheng
LHLibo Huang
Libo Huang
JBJie Bai
Jie Bai
XZXichan Zhu
Xichan Zhu
ZMZhixiong Ma
Zhixiong Ma
This article introduces a versatile multi-task learning framework (UMT-Net) and an Adaptive Task Weighting (ATW) training method, specifically designed for resource-constrained scenarios that demand parameter-efficient networks. The adaptable UMT-Net architecture includes a global-shared backbone based on an encoder, task-specific self-attention modules, inter-task joint-attention fusion modules, and feature-aggregating decoders. The ATW technique accounts for both short-term variation and long-term statistics of task losses, leading to a more stable training process. Extensive experiments on CityScapes and NYUv2 datasets reveal that UMT-Net outperforms baseline methods while requiring fewer computations, model parameters, and inference latency. In addition, we also conducted experiments on the autonomous driving dataset BDD100K and achieved state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we deployed the model and carried out tests for generalization in real-world scenarios. Finally, our network architecture possesses the capability to be designed as a compact model with much fewer parameters, computational requirements, and inference time, while maintaining competitive performance, making it suitable for deployment on mobile devices.