Deep Learning on Radar Centric 3D Object Detection

Abstract: Even though many existing 3D object detection algorithms rely mostly on camera and LiDAR, camera and LiDAR are prone to be affected by harsh weather and lighting conditions. On the other hand, radar is resistant to such conditions. However, research has found only recently to apply deep neural networks on radar data. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning approach to 3D object detection with radar only. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to demonstrate a deep learning-based 3D object detection model with radar only that was trained on the public radar dataset. To overcome the lack of radar labeled data, we propose a novel way of making use of abundant LiDAR data by transforming it into radar-like point cloud data and aggressive radar augmentation techniques.