# Multi-modal Sensor Fusion for Auto Driving Perception: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02703 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02703/

## Key facts

- Cited by 76 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08488/) (2017)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [PointPainting: Sequential Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10150/) (2019)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [PIXOR: Real-time 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06326/) (2019)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Deep Continuous Fusion for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10992/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling for Visual Question Answering and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01847/) (2016)
- [One Million Scenes for Autonomous Driving: ONCE Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11037/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12397/) (2020)
- [PandaSet: Advanced Sensor Suite Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12610/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR++: Accurate Depth for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06310/) (2019)
- [3D-CVF: Generating Joint Camera and LiDAR Features Using Cross-View Spatial Feature Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12636/) (2020)
- [PointFusion: Deep Sensor Fusion for 3D Bounding Box Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10871/) (2017)
- [EPNet: Enhancing Point Features with Image Semantics for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08856/) (2020)
- [Stereo R-CNN based 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09738/) (2019)
- [MVX-Net: Multimodal VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01649/) (2019)
- [CLOCs: Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00784/) (2020)
- [Offboard 3D Object Detection from Point Cloud Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05073/) (2021)
- [WoodScape: A multi-task, multi-camera fisheye dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01489/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Robo3D: Towards Robust and Reliable 3D Perception against Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17597/) (2023)
- [LoGoNet: Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection with Local-to-Global Cross-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03595/) (2023)
- [DFormer: Rethinking RGBD Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09668/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01008/) (2023)
- [Radar-Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10410/) (2023)
- [UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05573/) (2023)
- [MUVO: A Multimodal Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving with Geometric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11762/) (2023)
- [HRFuser: A Multi-resolution Sensor Fusion Architecture for 2D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15157/) (2022)
- [DetZero: Rethinking Offboard 3D Object Detection with Long-term Sequential Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06023/) (2023)
- [Vision-Based Traffic Accident Detection and Anticipation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15985/) (2023)
- [Learning Modality-agnostic Representation for Semantic Segmentation from Any Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11351/) (2024)
- [DFormerv2: Geometry Self-Attention for RGBD Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04701/) (2025)
- [Towards Knowledge-driven Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04316/) (2023)
- [EfficientGS: Streamlining Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale High-Resolution Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12777/) (2024)
- [HUM3DIL: Semi-supervised Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07729/) (2022)
- [Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Continual Semantic Segmentation: Theory, Challenge, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14277/) (2023)
- [SuperPC: A Single Diffusion Model for Point Cloud Completion, Upsampling, Denoising, and Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14558/) (2025)
- [MultiCorrupt: A Multi-Modal Robustness Dataset and Benchmark of LiDAR-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11677/) (2024)
- [Vision-RADAR fusion for Robotics BEV Detections: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06643/) (2023)
- [Cocoon: Robust Multi-Modal Perception with Uncertainty-Aware Sensor Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12592/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Perception Datasets for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12696/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Encoded Multi-Modal Fusion for Robust Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16121/) (2023)
- [Veila: Panoramic LiDAR Generation from a Monocular RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03690/) (2025)
- [ROD: RGB-Only Fast and Efficient Off-road Freespace Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08697/) (2025)
- [3D Multiple Object Tracking on Autonomous Driving: A Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15411/) (2023)
- [From Linguistic Giants to Sensory Maestros: A Survey on Cross-Modal Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18996/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of AI-Enabled Multi-sensor Fusion Systems: Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03454/) (2023)
- [GDTM: An Indoor Geospatial Tracking Dataset with Distributed Multimodal Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14136/) (2024)
- [MMLF: Multi-modal Multi-class Late Fusion for Object Detection with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08739/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal fusion is a fundamental task for the perception of an autonomous driving system, which has recently intrigued many researchers. However, achieving a rather good performance is not an easy task due to the noisy raw data, underutilized information, and the misalignment of multi-modal sensors. In this paper, we provide a literature review of the existing multi-modal-based methods for perception tasks in autonomous driving. Generally, we make a detailed analysis including over 50 papers leveraging perception sensors including LiDAR and camera trying to solve object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Different from traditional fusion methodology for categorizing fusion models, we propose an innovative way that divides them into two major classes, four minor classes by a more reasonable taxonomy in the view of the fusion stage. Moreover, we dive deep into the current fusion methods, focusing on the remaining problems and open-up discussions on the potential research opportunities. In conclusion, what we expect to do in this paper is to present a new taxonomy of multi-modal fusion methods for the autonomous driving perception tasks and provoke thoughts of the fusion-based techniques in the future.