L4DR: LiDAR-4DRadar Fusion for Weather-Robust 3D Object Detection

LiDAR-based 3D object detection is crucial for autonomous driving. However, due to the quality deterioration of LiDAR point clouds, it suffers from performance degradation in adverse weather conditions. Fusing LiDAR with the weatherrobust 4D radar sensor is expected to solve this problem; however, it faces challenges of significant differences in terms of data quality and the degree of degradation in adverse weather. To address these issues, we introduce L4DR, a weather-robust 3D object detection method that effectively achieves LiDAR and 4D Radar fusion. Our L4DR proposes Multi-Modal Encoding (MME) and Foreground-Aware Denoising (FAD) modules to reconcile sensor gaps, which is the first exploration of the complementarity of early fusion between LiDAR and 4D radar. Additionally, we design an Inter-Modal and IntraModal ({IM}2) parallel feature extraction backbone coupled with a Multi-Scale Gated Fusion (MSGF) module to counteract the varying degrees of sensor degradation under adverse weather conditions. Experimental evaluation on a VoD dataset with simulated fog proves that L4DR is more adaptable to changing weather conditions. It delivers a significant performance increase under different fog levels, improving the 3D mAP by up to 20.0% over the traditional LiDAR-only approach. Moreover, the results on the K-Radar dataset validate the consistent performance improvement of L4DR in realworld adverse weather conditions.