RaLiBEV: Radar and LiDAR BEV Fusion Learning for Anchor Box Free Object Detection System

In autonomous driving systems, LiDAR and radar play important roles in the perception of the surrounding environment.LiDAR provides accurate 3D spatial sensing information but cannot work in adverse weather like fog. On the other hand, the radar signal can be diffracted when encountering raindrops or mist particles thanks to its wavelength, but it suffers from large noise. Recent state-of-the-art works reveal that fusion of radar and LiDAR can lead to robust detection in adverse weather. The existing works adopt convolutional neural network architecture to extract features from each sensor data stream, then align and aggregate the two branch features to predict object detection results. However, these methods have low accuracy of bounding box estimations due to a simple design of label assignment and fusion strategies. In this paper, we propose a bird's-eye view fusion learning-based anchor box-free object detection system, which fuses the feature derived from the radar range-azimuth heatmap and the LiDAR point cloud to estimate the possible objects. Different label assignment strategies have been designed to facilitate the consistency between the classification of foreground or background anchor points and the corresponding bounding box regressions. In addition, the performance of the proposed object detector is further enhanced by employing a novel interactive transformer module. The superior performance of the proposed methods in this paper has been demonstrated using the recently published Oxford radar robotCar dataset, showing that the average precision of our system significantly outperforms the best state-of-the-art method by 14.4% and 20.5% at IoU equals 0.8 in clear and foggy weather testing, respectively.