DopplerPTNet: Object Detection Network with Doppler Velocity Information for FMCW LiDAR Point Cloud

Abstract In the field of autonomous driving, LiDAR plays a crucial role in perception and detection. LiDAR based on Time-of-Flight (ToF) mode can only provide three-dimensional spatial coordinate information of point clouds. In point cloud object detection, the limited feature information of spatial coordinates to some extent restricts the further optimization and improvement of algorithm detection performance. However, LiDAR based on Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) mode can not only obtain the three-dimensional spatial coordinates of point clouds, but also directly measure the Doppler velocity information of points, effectively compensating for the limitation of relying solely on spatial coordinate information for object recognition. Therefore, based on the CARLA simulator, we construct the first FMCW LiDAR point cloud object detection simulation dataset, FMCWLidDet. What’s more, a novel 4D object detection algorithm, DopplerPTNet, is proposed based on the direct acquisition of point Doppler velocity information by FMCW LiDAR. The algorithm solves the problem of single spatial coordinate information feature in existing 3D object detection algorithms, which makes it difficult to further improve detection accuracy. The dataset is available at https://github.com/xilight123/FMCW-LiDAR-object-detection-dataset .