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Datasets for autonomous cars are essential for the development and benchmarking of perception systems. However, most existing datasets are captured with camera and LiDAR sensors in good weather conditions. In this paper, we present the RAdar Dataset In Adverse weaThEr (RADIATE), aiming to facilitate research on object detection, tracking and scene understanding using radar sensing for safe autonomous driving. RADIATE includes 3 hours of annotated radar images with more than 200K labelled road actors in total, on average about 4.6 instances per radar image. It covers 8 different categories of actors in a variety of weather conditions (e.g., sun, night, rain, fog and snow) and driving scenarios (e.g., parked, urban, motorway and suburban), representing different levels of challenge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public radar dataset which provides high-resolution radar images on public roads with a large amount of road actors labelled. The data collected in adverse weather, e.g., fog and snowfall, is unique. Some baseline results of radar based object detection and recognition are given to show that the use of radar data is promising for automotive applications in bad weather, where vision and LiDAR can fail. RADIATE also has stereo images, 32-channel LiDAR and GPS data, directed at other applications such as sensor fusion, localisation and mapping. The public dataset can be accessed at http://pro.hw.ac.uk/radiate/. I. INTRODUCTIONAutonomous driving research and development rely heavily on the use of public datasets in the computer vision and robotics communities [1]-[3]. Camera and LiDAR are the two primary perceptual sensors that are usually adopted. However, since these are visible spectrum sensors, the data is affected dramatically by bad weather, causing attenuation, multiple scattering and

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Figure 1: POL-LWIR Vehicle detection. This paper uses the Thales Catherine MP LWIR sensor, which is based on long wave polarised infrared technology. It contains 4 linear polarisers (0 o , 45 o , 90 o , 135 o ). From the linear polarisers we can compute the Stokes components I,Q,U ,P and φ. Two configurations are created (I,Q,U and I,P ,φ), which are passed to 2 types of neural networks: Faster R-CNN [24] and SSD [22]. The networks are trained to detect vehicles in both day and night conditions. AbstractFor vehicle autonomy, driver assistance and situational awareness, it is necessary to operate at day and night, and in all weather conditions. In particular, long wave infrared (LWIR) sensors that receive predominantly emitted radiation have the capability to operate at night as well as during the day. In this work, we employ a polarised LWIR (POL-LWIR) camera to acquire data from a mobile vehicle, to compare and contrast four different convolutional neural network (CNN) configurations to detect other vehicles in video sequences. We evaluate two distinct and promising approaches, two-stage detection (Faster-RCNN) and one-stage detection (SSD), in four different configurations. We also employ two different image decompositions: the first based on the polarisation ellipse and the second on the Stokes parameters themselves. To evaluate our approach, the experimental trials were quantified by mean average precision (mAP) and processing time, showing a clear trade-off between the two factors. For example, the best mAP result of 80.94 % was achieved using Faster-RCNN, but at a frame rate of 6.4 fps. In contrast, MobileNet SSD achieved only 64.51 % mAP, but at 53.4 fps.

We present a novel, parameterised radar data augmentation (RADIO) technique to generate realistic radar samples from small datasets for the development of radar-related deep learning models. RADIO leverages the physical properties of radar signals, such as attenuation, azimuthal beam divergence and speckle noise, for data generation and augmentation. Exemplary applications on radar-based classification and detection demonstrate that RADIO can generate meaningful radar samples that effectively boost the accuracy of classification and generalisability of deep models trained with a small dataset.