LiRaFusion: Deep Adaptive LiDAR-Radar Fusion for 3D Object Detection

Abstract

We propose LiRaFusion to tackle LiDAR-radar fusion for 3D object detection to fill the performance gap of existing LiDAR-radar detectors. To improve the feature extraction capabilities from these two modalities, we design an early fusion module for joint voxel feature encoding, and a middle fusion module to adaptively fuse feature maps via a gated network. We perform extensive evaluation on nuScenes to demonstrate that LiRaFusion leverages the complementary information of LiDAR and radar effectively and achieves notable improvement over existing methods.

Accepted to ICRA 2024