For autonomous vehicles to be able to operate successfully they need to be aware of other vehicles with sufficient time to make safe, stable plans. Given the possible closing speeds between two vehicles, this necessitates the ability to accurately detect distant vehicles. Many current image-based object detectors using convolutional neural networks exhibit excellent performance on existing datasets such as KITTI. However, the performance of these networks falls when detecting small (distant) objects. We demonstrate that incorporating radar data can boost performance in these difficult situations. We also introduce an efficient automated method for training data generation using cameras of different focal lengths.

The availability of a large quantity of labelled training data is crucial for the training of modern object detectors. Hand labelling training data is time consuming and expensive while automatic labelling methods inevitably add unwanted noise to the labels. We examine the effect of different types of label noise on the performance of an object detector. We then show how co-teaching, a method developed for handling noisy labels and previously demonstrated on a classification problem, can be improved to mitigate the effects of label noise in an object detection setting. We illustrate our results using simulated noise on the KITTI dataset and on a vehicle detection task using automatically labelled data.

It has been demonstrated that the performance of an object detector degrades when it is used outside the domain of the data used to train it. However, obtaining training data for a new domain can be time consuming and expensive. In this work we demonstrate how a radar can be used to generate plentiful (but noisy) training data for image-based vehicle detection. We then show that the performance of a detector trained using the noisy labels can be considerably improved through a combination of noise-aware training techniques and relabelling of the training data using a second viewpoint. In our experiments, using our proposed process improves average precision by more than 17 percentage points when training from scratch and 10 percentage points when fine-tuning a pre-trained model.