Global relationship awareness 3-dimensional object detection using 4-dimensional radar

4D (4-dimensional) radar sensing technology is essential for high-precision autonomous driving perception systems, as its superior detection capabilities at increased distances, compared to traditional LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). However, due to the sparsity of point clouds and the low resolution of millimeter-wave radar, voxel-based methods may fail to detect distant or closely adjacent objects, leading to inadequate detection accuracy. To mitigate the accuracy issues arising from the sparse nature of point clouds in such scenarios, we propose a novel object detection network: GRA-Net (Global Relation-Aware object detection Network). By leveraging a self-attention mechanism, GRA-Net effectively learns critical features from each radar pillar, enhancing the network’s capacity to capture relevant information about nearby objects. Furthermore, we introduce a global perception module that integrates key features within the pillars and global features, mitigating the impact of point cloud sparsity, particularly in distant regions. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the performance of GRA-Net. On the Astyx HiRes 2019 dataset, our method achieved 33.63 mAP (mean Average Precision) and 43.93 mAP at the moderate level; On the View-of-Delft dataset, our method achieved 47.74 mAP in the entire annotated area and 69.25 mAP in the driving corridor area.