Object Detection and Heading Estimation from Radar Raw data

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Radar is an inevitable part of the perception sensor set for autonomous driving functions. It plays a gap-filling role to complement the shortcomings of other sensors in diverse scenarios and weather conditions.In this paper, we propose a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based end-to-end object detection and heading estimation framework using raw radar data. To this end, we approach the problem in both a "Data-centric" and "model-centric" manner. We refine the publicly available CARRADA [1] dataset and introduce Bivariate norm annotations. Besides, the baseline model is improved by a transformer [2] inspired cross-attention fusion and further center-offset maps are added to reduce localisation error. Our proposed model improves the detection mean Average Precision (mAP) by 5%, while reducing the model complexity by almost 23%. For comprehensive scene understanding purposes, we extend our model for heading estimation. The improved ground truth and proposed model is available at Github.