# RadarPillars: Efficient Object Detection from 4D Radar Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05020 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05020/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [PointRCNN: 3D Object Proposal Generation and Detection from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04244/) (2018)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15712/) (2020)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00463/) (2021)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [Spherical Transformer for LiDAR-based 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12766/) (2023)
- [Swin3D: A Pretrained Transformer Backbone for 3D Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06906/) (2023)
- [OctFormer: Octree-based Transformers for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03045/) (2023)
- [PillarNet: Real-Time and High-Performance Pillar-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07403/) (2022)
- [SWFormer: Sparse Window Transformer for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07372/) (2022)
- [RCBEVDet: Radar-camera Fusion in Bird's Eye View for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16440/) (2024)
- [FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08739/) (2023)
- [LXL: LiDAR Excluded Lean 3D Object Detection with 4D Imaging Radar and Camera Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00724/) (2023)
- [SMURF: Spatial Multi-Representation Fusion for 3D Object Detection with 4D Imaging Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10784/) (2023)
- [MVFAN: Multi-View Feature Assisted Network for 4D Radar Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16389/) (2023)
- [360^circ from a Single Camera: A Few-Shot Approach for LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06197/) (2023)
- [Robust 3D Object Detection from LiDAR-Radar Point Clouds via Cross-Modal Feature Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17336/) (2023)
- [LRPD: Long Range 3D Pedestrian Detection Leveraging Specific Strengths of LiDAR and RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09738/) (2020)
- [DVMN: Dense Validity Mask Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06709/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [MSSF: A 4D Radar and Camera Fusion Framework With Multi-Stage Sampling for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15016/) (2024)
- [SpaRC: Sparse Radar-Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19860/) (2024)
- [UniBEVFusion: Unified Radar-Vision BEVFusion for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14751/) (2024)
- [Text3DAug -- Prompted Instance Augmentation for LiDAR Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14253/) (2024)
- [MoRAL: Motion-aware Multi-Frame 4D Radar and LiDAR Fusion for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09422/) (2025)
- [Wavelet-based Multi-View Fusion of 4D Radar Tensor and Camera for Robust 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22972/) (2025)
- [SD4R: Sparse-to-Dense Learning for 3D Object Detection with 4D Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20653/) (2026)
- [RadarGaussianDet3D: Gaussian Representation-based Real-time 3D Object Detection with 4D Automotive Radars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16119/) (2025)
- [HyperDet: 3D Object Detection with Hyper 4D Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11554/) (2026)
- [RadarNeXt: Real-Time and Reliable 3D Object Detector Based On 4D mmWave Imaging Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02314/) (2025)
- [PAN: Pillars-Attention-Based Network for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15935/) (2025)
- [MLF-4DRCNet: Multi-Level Fusion with 4D Radar and Camera for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18613/) (2025)
- [4D Radar Meets LiDAR and Camera: Cooperative Perception under Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00416/) (2026)
- [Class-Aware PillarMix: Can Mixed Sample Data Augmentation Enhance 3D Object Detection with Radar Point Clouds?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02687/) (2025)
- [Graph Query Networks for Object Detection with Automotive Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15271/) (2025)
- [DRIFT: Dual-Representation Inter-Fusion Transformer for Automated Driving Perception with 4D Radar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09695/) (2026)
- [DinoRADE: Full Spectral Radar-Camera Fusion with Vision Foundation Model Features for Multi-class Object Detection in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08074/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Radar Perception With Spectral Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08282/) (2026)
- [PointTransformerX: Portable and Efficient 3D Point Cloud Processing without Sparse Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24169/) (2026)
- [RCGDet3D: Rethinking 4D Radar-Camera Fusion-based 3D Object Detection with Enhanced Radar Feature Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21112/) (2026)
- [ESAFusion: LiDAR--4-D Radar Fusion via Local Geometric Complementation and Multiscale Adaptive Interaction for 3-D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14619/) (2026)
- [Accuracy- and Real-Time-Aware 4D Radar Preprocessing for Autonomous Driving Perception Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18542/) (2026)
- [DyRAD: Radar Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39841/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automotive radar systems have evolved to provide not only range, azimuth and Doppler velocity, but also elevation data. This additional dimension allows for the representation of 4D radar as a 3D point cloud. As a result, existing deep learning methods for 3D object detection, which were initially developed for LiDAR data, are often applied to these radar point clouds. However, this neglects the special characteristics of 4D radar data, such as the extreme sparsity and the optimal utilization of velocity information. To address these gaps in the state-of-the-art, we present RadarPillars, a pillar-based object detection network. By decomposing radial velocity data, introducing PillarAttention for efficient feature extraction, and studying layer scaling to accommodate radar sparsity, RadarPillars significantly outperform state-of-the-art detection results on the View-of-Delft dataset. Importantly, this comes at a significantly reduced parameter count, surpassing existing methods in terms of efficiency and enabling real-time performance on edge devices.