There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications

Simulating realistic radar data has the potential to significantly accelerate the development of data-driven approaches to radar processing. However, it is fraught with difficulty due to the notoriously complex image formation process. Here we propose to learn a radar sensor model capable of synthes...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Weston, R, Jones, OP, Posner, I
Format: Conference item
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2021
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author Weston, R
Jones, OP
Posner, I
author_facet Weston, R
Jones, OP
Posner, I
author_sort Weston, R
collection OXFORD
description Simulating realistic radar data has the potential to significantly accelerate the development of data-driven approaches to radar processing. However, it is fraught with difficulty due to the notoriously complex image formation process. Here we propose to learn a radar sensor model capable of synthesising faithful radar observations based on simulated elevation maps. In particular, we adopt an adversarial approach to learning a forward sensor model from unaligned radar examples. In addition, modelling the backward model encourages the output to remain aligned to the world state through a cyclical consistency criterion. The backward model is further constrained to predict elevation maps from real radar data that are grounded by partial measurements obtained from corresponding lidar scans. Both models are trained in a joint optimisation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by evaluating a down-stream segmentation model trained purely on simulated data in a real-world deployment. This achieves performance within four percentage points of the same model trained entirely on real data.
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spelling oxford-uuid:08801290-a5f9-4031-824f-3c03bb881c402022-03-26T09:13:11ZThere and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applicationsConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:08801290-a5f9-4031-824f-3c03bb881c40EnglishSymplectic ElementsIEEE2021Weston, RJones, OPPosner, ISimulating realistic radar data has the potential to significantly accelerate the development of data-driven approaches to radar processing. However, it is fraught with difficulty due to the notoriously complex image formation process. Here we propose to learn a radar sensor model capable of synthesising faithful radar observations based on simulated elevation maps. In particular, we adopt an adversarial approach to learning a forward sensor model from unaligned radar examples. In addition, modelling the backward model encourages the output to remain aligned to the world state through a cyclical consistency criterion. The backward model is further constrained to predict elevation maps from real radar data that are grounded by partial measurements obtained from corresponding lidar scans. Both models are trained in a joint optimisation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by evaluating a down-stream segmentation model trained purely on simulated data in a real-world deployment. This achieves performance within four percentage points of the same model trained entirely on real data.
spellingShingle Weston, R
Jones, OP
Posner, I
There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications
title There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications
title_full There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications
title_fullStr There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications
title_full_unstemmed There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications
title_short There and back again: learning to simulate radar data for real-world applications
title_sort there and back again learning to simulate radar data for real world applications
work_keys_str_mv AT westonr thereandbackagainlearningtosimulateradardataforrealworldapplications
AT jonesop thereandbackagainlearningtosimulateradardataforrealworldapplications
AT posneri thereandbackagainlearningtosimulateradardataforrealworldapplications