4D Radar Perception Algorithms for Autonomous Driving: A Review

Reliable autonomous driving requires full-scene perception that couples foreground objects with dense semantic layout. Recently, 4D millimeter-wave radar has emerged as a robust and affordable sensor, yet its sparse returns make radar-camera fusion necessary for comprehensive scene understanding. Existing radar-camera methods mainly optimize detection, while dual-task systems usually decode boxes and occupancy with limited interaction. To address this gap and advance radar-based multi-task learning, we propose \method, a 4D radar-camera framework for 360$^\circ$ full-scene perception, which models semantic occupancy as a persistent scene state rather than a terminal output. \method{} follows a cross-modal state reasoning paradigm, where the occupancy state is modeled and propagated through stages for coarse-to-fine feature aggregation. Specifically, State-guided BEV Enhancement (SBE) strengthens intra-frame BEV representation, while Doppler-guided Temporal Fusion (DTF) preserves state evidence over longer temporal horizons. Beyond the model, we further extend ManTruckScenes with satellite-map-based generated occupancy labels and pair it with OmniHD-Scenes in a unified cross-dataset detection-and-occupancy protocol. The resulting experiments cover accuracy, robustness, ablation, and efficiency under one radar-camera multi-task evaluation framework. Code and labels will be released upon acceptance.

Vision-language models for autonomous driving primarily rely on cameras and LiDAR, leaving 4D radar largely unexplored as a standalone perceptual modality despite its robustness to adverse visibility and direct measurement of radial velocity. We introduce Radar4D-VLM, a radar-only temporal vision-language model that reasons from ten consecutive 4D-radar point-cloud sweeps without camera or LiDAR input. Radar4D-VLM extracts geometrically grounded object proposals and organizes radar evidence into a compact hierarchy of object, scene, and kinematic tokens. A parameter-efficient projector maps these tokens into frozen language backbones, while auditable prediction heads jointly model object count, spatial distribution, motion state, collision risk, semantic category, and radial velocity. Radar4D-VLM combines proposal-grounded temporal object tokenization, global scene context, and explicit kinematic tokens within a unified frozen-backbone interface. On sequence-isolated K-Radar development validation, its Top-64 proposal recall reaches 98.13% at 4 m, exceeding fixed-lattice and uniform-random controls by 6.40 and 22.83 percentage points, respectively. We further evaluate 24 matched runs spanning eight frozen Qwen, Phi, Mistral, Llama, and Gemma backbones under an identical adaptation budget. The radar-token interface remains compatible across all five language-model families, while matched aligned, permuted, and no-language controls show sensor dependence but no stable direct-head gain from aligned language supervision. These results establish a reproducible foundation for radar-only multimodal scene and motion reasoning while separating interface compatibility from the benefit of language supervision.

In recent years, 4D imaging radar has gained wide attention in autonomous driving for its robustness against harsh weather and ability to output target velocity. Nevertheless, mainstream 4D radar-camera fusion methods only support front-view perception, lacking mature solutions for surround-view sensing. Directly expanding these pipelines to full 360° coverage introduces excessive computation cost and limits real-world deployment. To tackle these limitations, this work proposes Sparse4D-Radar, an efficient robust surround-view multi-modal fusion framework. We first design a Deformable Fusion module to embed radar-camera features into sparse queries, constructing the lightweight base version Sparse4D-Radar-Base. Two dedicated modules are further introduced to boost localization accuracy and modality stability: Velocity-Consistency Sampling (VCS) refines features via radar velocity cues for motion awareness, and Adaptive Modality Gating (AMG) dynamically adjusts cross-modal fusion weights according to feature confidence. Combining all components, we build Sparse4D-Radar-Acc for high-precision detection demands. Comprehensive experiments on OmniHD-Scenes verify that our approach achieves state-of-the-art surround-view 3D detection performance. Compared with prior arts, our method obtains over 7% mAP and 10% ODS improvements under complex driving scenes while running at nearly 10 FPS, striking a favorable trade-off among detection accuracy, environmental robustness and inference efficiency. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/Aiuan/Sparse4D-Radar.