MVDFusion: Multimodal Vehicle Detection in Foggy Weather Using LiDAR and Radar Fusion

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar is widely used for vehicle detection in adverse weather conditions due to its robustness against environmental interference. However, the sparsity of mmWave radar data and the lack of height information significantly limit its broader applicability. To address these challenges, we propose MVDFusion, a multi-modal vehicle detection framework that integrates LiDAR and radar data for robust perception in foggy environments. The proposed framework is designed to fully exploit LiDAR information to compensate for the limitations of sparse radar data. Specifically, two key modules are developed: a radar height query module to enhance height estimation, and a radar–LiDAR query fusion module to improve feature representation. This design enables deep feature-level integration of mmWave radar and LiDAR data. Extensive experiments on the Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset demonstrate that MVDFusion achieves superior performance and robustness under foggy conditions. In particular, it outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods at intersection-over-union thresholds of 0.5, 0.65, and 0.8, achieving detection accuracies of 95.8%, 94.2%, and 81.5%.