Towards Pedestrian Detection in Radar Point Clouds with Pointnets

Pedestrian recognition with radar can enable the deployment of advanced driver-assistance systems. Despite neural networks representing a powerful yet effective tool for addressing this capability, their abilities as well as their limits have been scarcely addressed in the literature.

In this paper, we investigate how point-wise processing architectures use radar features to perform the task of pedestrian detection. We study the behavior of four different techniques in reaction to a perturbation of radar point clouds. We show that radar Doppler represents the most critical feature for the detection of pedestrians. However, we note that context plays an important role.

Finally, we prove that PointNet++ learns to use all the radar features in a proper, meaningful way, thus achieving superior performance to PointNet and Random Forest.