# AutoPlace: Robust Place Recognition with Single-chip Automotive Radar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [LCPR: A Multi-Scale Attention-Based LiDAR-Camera Fusion Network for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03198/) (2023)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards the Real-world Autonomy Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04497/) (2022)
- [GSPR: Multimodal Place Recognition Using 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00299/) (2024)
- [NYC-Event-VPR: A Large-Scale High-Resolution Event-Based Visual Place Recognition Dataset in Dense Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21615/) (2024)
- [Open-RadVLAD: Fast and Robust Radar Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15380/) (2024)
- [RaLF: Flow-based Global and Metric Radar Localization in LiDAR Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09875/) (2023)
- [Explicit Interaction for Fusion-Based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17264/) (2024)
- [LRFusionPR: A Polar BEV-Based LiDAR-Radar Fusion Network for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19186/) (2025)
- [UniMPR: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Place Recognition with Heterogeneous Sensor Configurations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18279/) (2025)
- [RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07920/) (2026)
- [4DRaL: Bridging 4D Radar with LiDAR for Place Recognition using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26206/) (2026)
- [MPTF-Net: Multi-view Pyramid Transformer Fusion Network for LiDAR-based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04513/) (2026)
- [Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18687/) (2026)
- [Automotive mmWave Spinning Radar Place Recognition with Spatially Gated Feature-Correlation Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27394/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel place recognition approach to autonomous vehicles by using low-cost, single-chip automotive radar. Aimed at improving recognition robustness and fully exploiting the rich information provided by this emerging automotive radar, our approach follows a principled pipeline that comprises (1) dynamic points removal from instant Doppler measurement, (2) spatial-temporal feature embedding on radar point clouds, and (3) retrieved candidates refinement from Radar Cross Section measurement. Extensive experimental results on the public nuScenes dataset demonstrate that existing visual/LiDAR/spinning radar place recognition approaches are less suitable for single-chip automotive radar. In contrast, our purpose-built approach for automotive radar consistently outperforms a variety of baseline methods via a comprehensive set of metrics, providing insights into the efficacy when used in a realistic system.