Tri-Perspective View (TPV) representations describe 3D scene structure through top, side, and front feature planes, but existing TPV lifting is primarily camera-based, leaving the depth of sampled image evidence ambiguous along projected camera rays. We propose RLG-TPV, a multimodal TPV framework for camera-radar 3D object detection in which radar and training-time LiDAR provide complementary geometric guidance during representation construction. A ray-guided deformable-attention lift weights sampled image features using LiDAR-supervised camera depth probabilities and radar frustum occupancy, while radar additionally refines the depth distribution before lifting. Because conventional radar provides limited elevation information, LiDAR-derived class-occupancy targets supervise the side and front planes during training; the corresponding heads are removed at inference, so deployment requires only cameras and radar. For temporal aggregation, Doppler-guided temporal fusion aligns past features using a motion field anchored by measured radar radial velocity, with gating that limits warping in regions without supported motion. An RCS-aware radar scatter further allows radar evidence to spread over spatial neighborhoods conditioned on radar cross section. On the nuScenes validation set, RLG-TPV achieves 0.4981 mAP and 0.5959 NDS, reducing orientation and velocity error by 31.9% and 30.7% relative to the published CRN baseline. Ablation studies show that ray-level geometric guidance is a major contributor to the final performance.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of RLG-TPV. Camera features are lifted into TPV using depth- and radar-guided attention, fused with RCS-aware radar features, temporally aligned using Doppler, and aggregated into BEV for 3D detection. Dashed paths denote training-only LiDAR supervision.
Figure 2: Radar-refined depth and ray-guided lifting. Radar features bias the camera depth logits via bR and provide occupancy OR for per-ray sample weighting before deformable-attention aggregation into the three TPV planes; D in the figure denotes Dbins .
Method
Input
Backbone
mAP
NDS
mATE
mASE
mAOE
mAVE
mAAE
CenterFusion [ 17 ]
C+R
DLA-34
0.332
0.453
0.649
0.263
0.535
0.540
0.142
BEVDepth [ 12 ]
C
ResNet-50
0.351
0.475
0.639
0.267
0.479
0.428
0.198
CRAFT [ 8 ]
C+R
DLA-34
0.411
0.517
0.494
0.276
0.454
0.486
0.176
CRN [ 9 ]
C+R
ResNet-50
0.490
0.560
0.487
0.277
0.542
0.344
0.197
RCBEVDet [ 14 ]
C+R
ResNet-50
0.453
0.568
0.486
0.285
0.404
0.220
0.192
CRT-Fusion [ 7 ]
C+R
ResNet-50
0.500
0.572
0.499
0.277
0.531
0.261
0.192
Table 1: Comparison with camera (C) and camera-radar (C+R) methods on nuScenes val at 256×704 . Published CRN is shown here; its released implementation is used for ablations. Higher is better for mAP/NDS and lower for the error metrics.
Lift variant
mAP
NDS
LSS + RVT (warm-start)
0.4886
0.5842
Unguided attentive
0.4266
0.5321
Per-cell radar gate
0.4311
0.5354
Per-ray P(d)× radar, xy only
0.4804
0.5782
XYONLY (keyframe-only)
0.4407
0.5422
Table 2: Camera-lift ablation on nuScenes val. Radar and MFA are fixed. Unguided variants use three TPV planes with a 3D-conv head, while per-ray variants use xy-only CenterPoint.
Configuration
mAP
NDS
CRN baseline (released code)
0.4725
0.5617
Single-plane warm start (LSS + RVT)
0.4886
0.5842
Ray-guided TPV lift, xy only
0.4804
0.5782
+ height planes, plane sup., RCS scatter
0.4920
0.5882
target: GT boxes → LiDAR occ.
0.4925
0.5872
+ radar-refined depth (RRD)
0.4932
0.5893
Table 3: Incremental construction of RLG-TPV on nuScenes val. From the ray-guided lift onward, each row is warm-started from the previous configuration and retrained for 24 epochs; changes within ±0.005 run-to-run variation are discussed in the text. The warm start is the LSS + RVT row of Tab. 2 .
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison on nuScenes val. Columns: ground truth, CRN [ 9 ] , RLG-TPV. Boxes are green (GT), orange (CRN) and blue (ours); map and LiDAR points are shown for visualisation only, as inference uses cameras and radar. Top: daytime crossing. Bottom: night.
Configuration
Δ mAP
Δ NDS
− radar entirely (camera-only)
−35.5%
−30.2%
− temporal context (1 keyframe)
−11.5%
−18.8%
− ray guidance (unguided attention)
−7.3%
−7.2%
− sampling density ( K=4 )
−2.7%
−0.7%
− RCS-aware scatter
−2.1%
−4.7%
− radar-refined depth (RRD)
−0.1%
−1.4%
Table 4: Removal ablations on nuScenes val. Each row removes one component from the full model and reports the relative change after retraining.
Robust 3D object detection in adverse weather conditions is challenging due to sensor limitations. Although combining complementary modalities such as LiDAR and 4D RADAR has shown promise, the sparsity of these sensors becomes apparent in adverse weather with reduced reflections, leading to objects with few or no point cloud returns. To address this limitation, camera sensors provide visual cues even when LiDAR and RADAR signals are weakened. However, cameras themselves are also vulnerable to adverse weather, where some regions become unreliable due to snow or rain occluding the camera lens. While some camera-fusion methods designed for adverse weather learn to weigh image regions via confidence maps, these maps receive no direct supervision and are learned solely through the detection loss. We introduce Reliability-Aware Fusion (RAF), which explicitly supervises per-pixel reliability estimation and provides a direct learning signal for identifying and suppressing unreliable visual cues. Our framework leverages pretrained LiDAR-RADAR networks, keeping their backbones frozen while only training the added camera branch, BEV fusion encoder, and detection head. Extensive experiments on the K-Radar and VoD datasets demonstrate that integrating RAF consistently improves detection accuracy over LiDAR-RADAR baselines, achieving up to +6.5 APBEV and +7.4 AP3D gains. Code is available at https://github.com/parkie0517/RAF.
Long-range 3D object detection is critical for safe autonomous driving at highway speeds, yet existing radar-camera fusion methods remain limited at extended ranges. BEV-based methods capture scene-level context but incur rapidly growing computation and often lose fine-grained object detail, while query-based methods are efficient but provide limited scene-level context. Temporal fusion further requires both multi-frame accumulation for sparse distant observations and object-level motion modeling for fast-moving objects. We propose Horizon3D, a sparse radar-camera fusion framework for long-range 3D object detection that combines Gaussian primitives with sparse BEV features. Horizon3D initializes Gaussian primitives at radar- and camera-estimated object keypoints using Keypoint-Guided Gaussian Initialization, refines them through Object-Centric Sparse Fusion, and splats them onto the BEV plane to fuse object-level detail with sparse radar BEV context. It further introduces Dual-Path Temporal Fusion, which aggregates temporal cues through a BEV path for scene-level accumulation and a Gaussian path for object-level motion propagation. Experiments on TruckScenes show that Horizon3D achieves state-of-the-art radar-camera 3D detection performance. On the validation set, it outperforms the previous best method by +3.0 NDS and +1.6 mAP while maintaining competitive inference speed.
Geonho Bang, Geunju Baek, Dongyoung Lee +2
Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
4D automotive radar is indispensable for autonomous driving due to its low cost and robustness, yet its point cloud sparsity challenges 3D object detection. Existing 4D radar-camera fusion methods focus on complex fusion strategies, trading inference speed for marginal gains. This trade-off hinders real-time deployment due to heavy computation on dense feature maps. In contrast, feature extraction from sparse radar points is less time-consuming but remains under-explored. This work uncovers that simply enhancing radar feature extraction can achieve comparable or even higher performance than elaborate fusion modules, while maintaining real-time performance. Based on this finding, we propose RCGDet3D, which centers on radar feature encoding and simplifies multi-modal fusion. Its encoder inherits from the efficient Gaussian Splatting-based Point Gaussian Encoder (PGE) in RadarGaussianDet3D with two key improvements. First, the Ray-centric PGE (R-PGE) predicts Gaussian attributes in ray-aligned coordinate systems before unifying them to Bird's-Eye View (BEV) space, significantly improving geometric consistency and reducing learning difficulty by decoupling the coordinate transformation from representation learning. Second, a Semantic Injection (SI) module incorporates visual cues from images, producing more geometrically accurate and semantically enriched radar features. Experiments on View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadSet show that RCGDet3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed, setting a new benchmark for real-time deployment.
Weiyi Xiong, Bing Zhu
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, P.R. China