Resource-Efficient 3D Shape and Orientation Estimation of Road Users using Roadside RGB Camera and 3D Radar

Abstract

End-to-end deep learning pipelines for camera-radar 3D object detection are well established in driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles; however, adapting them to roadside-mounted infrastructure presents significant challenges. On vehicles, sensor heights, pitch angles, and relative geometries remain largely uniform, allowing end-to-end models to generalize effectively. On the contrary, roadside sensor installations vary drastically in height, tilt, and field of view across locations, rendering end-to-end models prone to failure and difficult to adapt without massive location-specific datasets. Hence, instead of designing a complex end-to-end pipeline for direct 3D bounding box estimation, a low-cost, resource-efficient two-stage approach is proposed for real-time 3D shape and orientation estimation. The first stage utilizes any off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art method to extract 2D camera bounding boxes and associated 3D radar points for each road user. The proposed second stage then processes these inputs to construct 3D oriented bounding boxes where radar data determines 3D position, predefined templates define size for each road user, and a tiny neural network predicts a site-specific and optimized yaw angle. The algorithm is successfully validated at a curved road with a junction for pedestrians, bicycles, and cars, where it achieves 25 frames per second on an NVIDIA Jetson ORIN for real-time applications.