Stereo 4D Radar for 3D Object Detection: Integrating Geometric Alignment and Absolute Velocity Estimation
TL;DR
A stereo 4D Radar-based 3D object detection framework that exploits the geometric disparity between left and right Radars to estimate the absolute velocity of objects and achieve more robust perception through the fusion of their complementary features is introduced.
Abstract
Four-dimensional (4D) Radar is a powerful sensing modality capable of detecting surrounding three-dimensional (3D) objects under diverse weather conditions and providing Doppler-based motion information. However, raw 4D Radar signals contain significant clutter from road surfaces, guardrails, and surrounding vehicles, along with multipath-induced ghost reflections and the receiver's inherent noise floor. Consequently, preprocessing algorithms designed to remove such invalid measurements often make the Radar data excessively sparse. Moreover, the Doppler measurements provided by 4D Radar describe only the radial component of an object's velocity, limiting their ability to recover the full motion state. In this paper, we introduce a stereo 4D Radar-based 3D object detection framework that exploits the geometric disparity between left and right Radars to estimate the absolute velocity of objects and achieve more robust perception through the fusion of their complementary features. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on our in-house stereo 4D Radar dataset, demonstrating performance gains of 8.82 points in AP 3D and 9.0 points in AP BEV over state-of-the-art mono 4D Radar baselines. These results demonstrate that absolute velocity estimation combined with stereo geometry-aware feature fusion leads to substantial improvements in 3D object detection.