RadarGSOcc: Doppler-Aware 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction Using 4D Radar Tensor with Geometric-Semantic Feature Extraction

Abstract

3D semantic occupancy prediction is crucial for autonomous driving, but camera-based methods degrade in low-light conditions and LiDAR-based methods are sensitive to adverse weather. 4D radar is more robust, yet its sparsity and the high cost of radar tensor processing limit its use. We propose Radar Geometric-Semantic Occupancy Prediction (RadarGSOcc), an efficient framework that directly processes 4D radar tensors by separately extracting geometric and semantic features, including Doppler information, with a deformable attention-based geometric refinement module as its key component. We also introduce the K-Radar 3DSemOcc benchmark, the first large-scale benchmark for 3D semantic occupancy prediction using 4D radar tensors, built on the K-Radar dataset with refined LiDAR-based annotations. RadarGSOcc predicts 15 classes within a 51.2m range and achieves 38.2% IoU, 7.6% mIoU, and 25.5% weighted mIoU, outperforming RadarOcc by 17% relative (25.5 vs. 21.9) in weighted mIoU while using fewer parameters and lower computation. It substantially improves truck prediction while trading off car accuracy, outperforms camera-based approaches, and narrows the gap with LiDAR-based methods. To assess robustness without per-frame ground truth in adverse weather, we further propose a novel proxy metric, Environment-Based KL Divergence (EBKL), under which 4D radar proves a reliable and efficient modality for 3D semantic occupancy prediction. The dataset and code will be publicly available.