Cascaded object detection networks for FMCW radars

Object detection using FMCW (Frequency-modulated continuous wave) radars is of massive importance for the advanced driver assistance systems. However, it is exceptionally challenging due to the diversity of the electromagnetic environment and the existence of the class imbalance in the radar data space. In this paper, we propose a cascaded object detection network to achieve accurate object detection using FMCW radars. Consisting of a ROI generation stage and a final detection stage, the proposed cascaded network can tackle the problem of the class imbalance and detect objects from the range-Doppler or range-velocity space effectively. Besides, we propose a range-velocity regression procedure to improve the performance of the range-velocity localization. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach can robustly detect objects from noisy electromagnetic environments with a high localization accuracy.