Warping of Radar Data into Camera Image for Cross-Modal Supervision in Automotive Applications

In this paper, we present a novel framework to project automotive radar range-Doppler (RD) spectrum into camera image. The utilized warping operation is designed to be fully differentiable, which allows error backpropagation through the operation. This enables the training of neural networks (NN) operating exclusively on RD spectrum by utilizing labels provided from camera vision models. As the warping operation relies on accurate scene flow, additionally, we present a novel scene flow estimation algorithm fed from camera, lidar and radar, enabling us to improve the accuracy of the warping operation. We demonstrate the framework in multiple applications like direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation, target detection, semantic segmentation and estimation of radar power from camera data. Extensive evaluations have been carried out for the DoA application and suggest superior quality for NN based estimators compared to classical estimators. The novel scene flow estimation approach is benchmarked against state-of-the-art scene flow algorithms and outperforms them by roughly a third.