# CenterFusion: Center-based Radar and Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04841 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04841/

## Key facts

- Cited by 161 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 161)

- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [BEVDet: High-performance Multi-camera 3D Object Detection in Bird-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11790/) (2021)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [BEVDet4D: Exploit Temporal Cues in Multi-camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17054/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: A Simple and Robust LiDAR-Camera Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13790/) (2022)
- [FUTR3D: A Unified Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10642/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14160/) (2021)
- [BEVerse: Unified Perception and Prediction in Birds-Eye-View for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09743/) (2022)
- [3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09474/) (2022)
- [Vision-Centric BEV Perception: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02797/) (2022)
- [Delving into the Devils of Bird's-eye-view Perception: A Review, Evaluation and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05324/) (2022)
- [K-Radar: 4D Radar Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Various Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08171/) (2022)
- [CRN: Camera Radar Net for Accurate, Robust, Efficient 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00670/) (2023)
- [RCBEVDet: Radar-camera Fusion in Bird's Eye View for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16440/) (2024)
- [CRAFT: Camera-Radar 3D Object Detection with Spatio-Contextual Fusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06535/) (2022)
- [3D Object Detection from Images for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02980/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12735/) (2021)
- [Radar-Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10410/) (2023)
- [LXL: LiDAR Excluded Lean 3D Object Detection with 4D Imaging Radar and Camera Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00724/) (2023)
- [Radar-Camera Pixel Depth Association for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02778/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking the Robustness of LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14951/) (2022)
- [Bridging the View Disparity Between Radar and Camera Features for Multi-modal Fusion 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12079/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Fusion and Vision-Language Models: A Survey for Robot Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02477/) (2025)
- [X-Align: Cross-Modal Cross-View Alignment for Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06778/) (2022)
- [WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmarks for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06505/) (2023)
- [Unleashing HyDRa: Hybrid Fusion, Depth Consistency and Radar for Unified 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07746/) (2024)
- [OccFusion: Multi-Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01644/) (2024)
- [HRFuser: A Multi-resolution Sensor Fusion Architecture for 2D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15157/) (2022)
- [CramNet: Camera-Radar Fusion with Ray-Constrained Cross-Attention for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09267/) (2022)
- [MVFusion: Multi-View 3D Object Detection with Semantic-aligned Radar and Camera Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10511/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The perception system in autonomous vehicles is responsible for detecting and tracking the surrounding objects. This is usually done by taking advantage of several sensing modalities to increase robustness and accuracy, which makes sensor fusion a crucial part of the perception system. In this paper, we focus on the problem of radar and camera sensor fusion and propose a middle-fusion approach to exploit both radar and camera data for 3D object detection. Our approach, called CenterFusion, first uses a center point detection network to detect objects by identifying their center points on the image. It then solves the key data association problem using a novel frustum-based method to associate the radar detections to their corresponding object's center point. The associated radar detections are used to generate radar-based feature maps to complement the image features, and regress to object properties such as depth, rotation and velocity. We evaluate CenterFusion on the challenging nuScenes dataset, where it improves the overall nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) of the state-of-the-art camera-based algorithm by more than 12%. We further show that CenterFusion significantly improves the velocity estimation accuracy without using any additional temporal information. The code is available at https://github.com/mrnabati/CenterFusion .