# Exploiting Sparsity in Automotive Radar Object Detection Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07748 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07748/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [Sparse 3D convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.02890/) (2015)
- [CNN based Road User Detection using the 3D Radar Cube](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12165/) (2020)
- [2D Car Detection in Radar Data with PointNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08414/) (2019)
- [Spatially-sparse convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.6070/) (2014)
- [Improved Orientation Estimation and Detection with Hybrid Object Detection Networks for Automotive Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02111/) (2022)
- [Pointillism: Accurate 3D bounding box estimation with multi-radars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04440/) (2022)
- [Deep Radar Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12187/) (2019)
- [HVDetFusion: A Simple and Robust Camera-Radar Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11323/) (2023)
- [DeepFusion: A Robust and Modular 3D Object Detector for Lidars, Cameras and Radars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12729/) (2022)
- [Sparse PointPillars: Maintaining and Exploiting Input Sparsity to Improve Runtime on Embedded Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06882/) (2021)
- [DeepReflecs: Deep Learning for Automotive Object Classification with Radar Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09273/) (2020)
- [Improved Multi-Scale Grid Rendering of Point Clouds for Radar Object Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15836/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Bosch Street Dataset: A Multi-Modal Dataset with Imaging Radar for Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12803/) (2024)
- [BEVMOSNet: Multimodal Fusion for BEV Moving Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03280/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Having precise perception of the environment is crucial for ensuring the secure and reliable functioning of autonomous driving systems. Radar object detection networks are one fundamental part of such systems. CNN-based object detectors showed good performance in this context, but they require large compute resources. This paper investigates sparse convolutional object detection networks, which combine powerful grid-based detection with low compute resources. We investigate radar specific challenges and propose sparse kernel point pillars (SKPP) and dual voxel point convolutions (DVPC) as remedies for the grid rendering and sparse backbone architectures. We evaluate our SKPP-DPVCN architecture on nuScenes, which outperforms the baseline by 5.89% and the previous state of the art by 4.19% in Car AP4.0. Moreover, SKPP-DPVCN reduces the average scale error (ASE) by 21.41% over the baseline.