Doppler Former: Velocity Supervision of Raw Radar Data

Abstract

Thanks to the high robustness of 4D millimeterwave radar in various environments, it has been widely applied in the field of autonomous driving. Recent research has increasingly focused on utilizing raw data, as a substitute for the sparse and noisy point cloud data. However, these approaches have not fully exploited the Doppler features present in the raw data. In this paper, we introduce the Doppler Former (DPF) module to efficiently extract velocity information from the target environment. DPF can be seamlessly integrated into most radar perception backbone and enhance their performance in downstream tasks. Additionally, we propose a new backbone, Fully Complex Convolutional Network (FCCN), which is more suitable for raw data. By incorporating the DPF module into FCCN, we achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the RADIal dataset, with code available at https://github.com/coconut-zs/Fvidar-DopplerFormer.