RADLER: Radar Object Detection Leveraging Semantic 3D City Models and Self-Supervised Radar-Image Learning

Semantic 3D city models are worldwide easy-accessible, providing accurate, object-oriented, and semantic-rich 3D priors. To date, their potential to mitigate the noise impact on radar object detection remains under-explored. In this paper, we first introduce a unique dataset, RadarCity, comprising 54K synchronized radar-image pairs and semantic 3D city models. Moreover, we propose a novel neural network, RADLER, leveraging the effectiveness of contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) and semantic 3D city models to enhance radar object detection of pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. Specifically, we first obtain the robust radar features via a SSL network in the radar-image pretext task. We then use a simple yet effective feature fusion strategy to incorporate semantic-depth features from semantic 3D city models. Having prior 3D information as guidance, RADLER obtains more fine-grained details to enhance radar object detection. We extensively evaluate RADLER on the collected RadarCity dataset and demonstrate average improvements of 5.46% in mean average precision (mAP) and 3.51% in mean average recall (mAR) over previous radar object detection methods. We believe this work will foster further research on semantic-guided and map-supported radar object detection. Our project page is publicly available at https://gpp-communication.github.io/RADLER.