# Leveraging Self-Supervised Instance Contrastive Learning for Radar Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08427 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08427/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [VideoMoCo: Contrastive Video Representation Learning with Temporally Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05905/) (2021)
- [Aligning Pretraining for Detection via Object-Level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02637/) (2021)
- [Instance Localization for Self-supervised Detection Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08318/) (2021)
- [DETReg: Unsupervised Pretraining with Region Priors for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04550/) (2021)
- [Raw High-Definition Radar for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10646/) (2021)
- [CARRADA Dataset: Camera and Automotive Radar with Range-Angle-Doppler Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01456/) (2020)
- [Patch-level Representation Learning for Self-supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07990/) (2022)
- [RADDet: Range-Azimuth-Doppler based Radar Object Detection for Dynamic Road Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00363/) (2021)
- [2D Car Detection in Radar Data with PointNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08414/) (2019)
- [Distilling Localization for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06638/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, driven by the need for safer and more autonomous transport systems, the automotive industry has shifted toward integrating a growing number of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Among the array of sensors employed for object recognition tasks, radar sensors have emerged as a formidable contender due to their abilities in adverse weather conditions or low-light scenarios and their robustness in maintaining consistent performance across diverse environments. However, the small size of radar datasets and the complexity of the labelling of those data limit the performance of radar object detectors. Driven by the promising results of self-supervised learning in computer vision, this paper presents RiCL, an instance contrastive learning framework to pre-train radar object detectors. We propose to exploit the detection from the radar and the temporal information to pre-train the radar object detection model in a self-supervised way using contrastive learning. We aim to pre-train an object detector's backbone, head and neck to learn with fewer data. Experiments on the CARRADA and the RADDet datasets show the effectiveness of our approach in learning generic representations of objects in range-Doppler maps. Notably, our pre-training strategy allows us to use only 20% of the labelled data to reach a similar mAP@0.5 than a supervised approach using the whole training set.