End-to-End Target Liveness Detection via mmWave Radar and Vision Fusion for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

The successful operation of autonomous vehicles hinges on their ability to accurately identify objects in their vicinity, particularly living targets such as bikers and pedestrians. However, visual interference inherent in real-world environments, such as omnipresent billboards, poses substantial challenges to extant vision-based detection technologies. These visual interference exhibit similar visual attributes to living targets, leading to erroneous identification. We address this problem by harnessing the capabilities of mmWave radar, a vital sensor in autonomous vehicles, in combination with vision technology, thereby contributing a unique solution for liveness target detection. We propose a methodology that extracts features from the mmWave radar signal to achieve end-to-end liveness target detection by integrating the mmWave radar and vision technology. This proposed methodology is implemented and evaluated on the commodity mmWave radar IWR6843ISK-ODS and vision sensor Logitech camera. Our extensive evaluation reveals that the proposed method accomplishes liveness target detection with a mean average precision (mAP) of 98.1%, surpassing the performance of existing studies.