A Near-Field Area Object Detection Method for Intelligent Vehicles Based on Multi-Sensor Information Fusion

In order to solve the difficulty for intelligent vehicles in detecting near-field targets, this paper proposes a near-field object detection method based on multi-sensor information fusion. Firstly, the F-CenterFusion method is proposed to fuse the information from LiDAR, millimeter wave (mmWave) radar, and camera to fully obtain target state information in the near-field area. Secondly, multi-attention modules are constructed in the image and point cloud feature extraction networks, respectively, to locate the targets’ class-dependent features and suppress the expression of useless information. Then, the dynamic connection mechanism is used to fuse image and point cloud information to enhance feature expression capabilities. The fusion results are input into the predictive inference head network to obtain target attributes, locations, and other data. This method is verified by the nuScenes dataset. Compared with the CenterFusion method using mmWave radar and camera fusion information, the NDS and mAP values of our method are improved by 5.1% and 10.9%, respectively, and the average accuracy score of multi-class detection is improved by 22.7%. The experimental results show that the proposed method can enable intelligent vehicles to realize near-field target detection with high accuracy and strong robustness.