Papers › CenterFusion: Center-based Radar and Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection

CenterFusion: Center-based Radar and Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection

10 Nov 2020arXiv:2011.04841archive 2025-07-28

Ramin Nabati, Hairong Qi

The perception system in autonomous vehicles is responsible for detecting and tracking the surrounding objects. This is usually done by taking advantage of several sensing modalities to increase robustness and accuracy, which makes sensor fusion a crucial part of the perception system. In this paper, we focus on the problem of radar and camera sensor fusion and propose a middle-fusion approach to exploit both radar and camera data for 3D object detection. Our approach, called CenterFusion, first uses a center point detection network to detect objects by identifying their center points on the image. It then solves the key data association problem using a novel frustum-based method to associate the radar detections to their corresponding object's center point. The associated radar detections are used to generate radar-based feature maps to complement the image features, and regress to object properties such as depth, rotation and velocity. We evaluate CenterFusion on the challenging nuScenes dataset, where it improves the overall nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) of the state-of-the-art camera-based algorithm by more than 12%. We further show that CenterFusion significantly improves the velocity estimation accuracy without using any additional temporal information. The code is available at https://github.com/mrnabati/CenterFusion .

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mrnabati/CenterFusion officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
HengWeiBin/CenterFusionDetect3D mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
ngowilliam1/centerfusion_depth_factor mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

3D Object DetectionAutonomous VehiclesObject DetectionSensor Fusionobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Object Detection nuScenes CenterFusion NDS 0.449 #316 of 372 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection nuScenes CenterFusion mAP 0.326 #316 of 372 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection nuscenes Camera-Radar CenterFusion NDS 44.9 #11 of 11 Archive leaderboard report

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