# Gaussian Radar Transformer for Semantic Segmentation in Noisy Radar Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03690/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [Cylindrical and Asymmetrical 3D Convolution Networks for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10033/) (2020)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [PolarNet: An Improved Grid Representation for Online LiDAR Point Clouds Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14032/) (2020)
- [SqueezeSeg: Convolutional Neural Nets with Recurrent CRF for Real-Time Road-Object Segmentation from 3D LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07368/) (2017)
- [SqueezeSegV2: Improved Model Structure and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Road-Object Segmentation from a LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08495/) (2018)
- [SalsaNext: Fast, Uncertainty-aware Semantic Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03653/) (2020)
- [Rethinking and Improving Relative Position Encoding for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14222/) (2021)
- [RPVNet: A Deep and Efficient Range-Point-Voxel Fusion Network for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12978/) (2021)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [(AF)2-S3Net: Attentive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Feature Selection for Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04530/) (2021)
- [Modeling Point Clouds with Self-Attention and Gumbel Subset Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03375/) (2019)
- [Multi-Agent Tensor Fusion for Contextual Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04776/) (2019)

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

- [Radar-Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10410/) (2023)
- [T-FFTRadNet: Object Detection with Swin Vision Transformers from Raw ADC Radar Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16940/) (2023)
- [Radar Instance Transformer: Reliable Moving Instance Segmentation in Sparse Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16435/) (2023)
- [NeuRadar: Neural Radiance Fields for Automotive Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00859/) (2025)
- [Improved Multi-Scale Grid Rendering of Point Clouds for Radar Object Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15836/) (2023)
- [4D Radar Semantic Segmentation of People in Field Conditions Using Temporal Multi-View Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05307/) (2024)
- [4D-ROLLS: 4D Radar Occupancy Learning via LiDAR Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13905/) (2025)
- [CaRaFFusion: Improving 2D Semantic Segmentation with Camera-Radar Point Cloud Fusion and Zero-Shot Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03679/) (2025)
- [Radar Tracker: Moving Instance Tracking in Sparse and Noisy Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03441/) (2025)
- [Radar Velocity Transformer: Single-scan Moving Object Segmentation in Noisy Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03463/) (2025)
- [SemRaFiner: Panoptic Segmentation in Sparse and Noisy Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06906/) (2025)
- [Redefining Radar Segmentation: Simultaneous Static-Moving Segmentation and Ego-Motion Estimation using Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20003/) (2025)
- [Simultaneous Clutter Detection and Semantic Segmentation of Moving Objects for Automotive Radar Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07247/) (2023)
- [HybridTM: Combining Transformer and Mamba for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18575/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Moving Object Segmentation of Sparse and Noisy Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02395/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene understanding is crucial for autonomous robots in dynamic environments for making future state predictions, avoiding collisions, and path planning. Camera and LiDAR perception made tremendous progress in recent years, but face limitations under adverse weather conditions. To leverage the full potential of multi-modal sensor suites, radar sensors are essential for safety critical tasks and are already installed in most new vehicles today. In this paper, we address the problem of semantic segmentation of moving objects in radar point clouds to enhance the perception of the environment with another sensor modality. Instead of aggregating multiple scans to densify the point clouds, we propose a novel approach based on the self-attention mechanism to accurately perform sparse, single-scan segmentation. Our approach, called Gaussian Radar Transformer, includes the newly introduced Gaussian transformer layer, which replaces the softmax normalization by a Gaussian function to decouple the contribution of individual points. To tackle the challenge of the transformer to capture long-range dependencies, we propose our attentive up- and downsampling modules to enlarge the receptive field and capture strong spatial relations. We compare our approach to other state-of-the-art methods on the RadarScenes data set and show superior segmentation quality in diverse environments, even without exploiting temporal information.