Chandrasekaran, Kavin (Elektrobit Automotive GmbH), Grigorescu, Sorin Mihai (Transilvania University of Brasov), Dubbelman, Gijs (Eindhoven University of Technology), Jancura, Pavol (Eindhoven University of Technology)

REFNet++: Multi-Task Efficient Fusion of Camera and Radar Sensor Data in Bird’s-Eye Polar View

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "S28a-Multi-Sensor Fusion and Perception for Robust Autonomous Driving" (TH-LM-T28), Thursday, November 20, 2025, 12:10−12:30, Stradbroke

2025 IEEE 28th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), November 18-21, 2025, Gold Coast, Australia

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on October 18, 2025

Abstract

A realistic view of the vehicle’s surroundings is generally offered by camera sensors, which is crucial for environmental perception. Affordable radar sensors, on the other hand, are becoming invaluable due to their robustness in variable weather conditions. However, because of their noisy output and reduced classification capability, they work best when combined with other sensor data. Specifically, we address the challenge of multimodal sensor fusion by aligning radar and camera data in a unified domain, prioritizing not only accuracy, but also computational efficiency. Our work leverages the raw range-Doppler (RD) spectrum from radar and front-view camera images as inputs. To enable effective fusion, we employ a variational encoder-decoder architecture that learns the transformation of front-view camera data into the Bird’s-Eye View (BEV) polar domain. Concurrently, a radar encoder-decoder learns to recover the angle information from the RD data that produce Range-Azimuth (RA) features. This alignment ensures that both modalities are represented in a compatible domain, facilitating robust and efficient sensor fusion. We evaluated our fusion strategy for vehicle detection and free space segmentation against state-of-the-art methods using the RADIal dataset.