Thomas Griebel

Thomas Griebel, Dominik Authaler, Markus Horn et al.

For autonomous driving, radar is an important sensor type. On the one hand, radar offers a direct measurement of the radial velocity of targets in the environment. On the other hand, in literature, radar sensors are known for their robustness against several kinds of adverse weather conditions. However, on the downside, radar is susceptible to ghost targets or clutter which can be caused by several different causes, e.g., reflective surfaces in the environment. Ghost targets, for instance, can result in erroneous object detections. To this end, it is desirable to identify anomalous targets as early as possible in radar data. In this work, we present an approach based on PointNets to detect anomalous radar targets. Modifying the PointNet-architecture driven by our task, we developed a novel grouping variant which contributes to a multi-form grouping module. Our method is evaluated on a real-world dataset in urban scenarios and shows promising results for the detection of anomalous radar targets.

Thomas Griebel, Johannes Müller, Michael Buchholz et al.

Self-assessment is a key to safety and robustness in automated driving. In order to design safer and more robust automated driving functions, the goal is to self-assess the performance of each module in a whole automated driving system. One crucial component in automated driving systems is the tracking of surrounding objects, where the Kalman filter is the most fundamental tracking algorithm. For Kalman filters, some classical online consistency measures exist for self-assessment, which are based on classical probability theory. However, these classical approaches lack the ability to measure the explicit statistical uncertainty within the self-assessment, which is an important quality measure, particularly, if only a small number of samples is available for the self-assessment. In this work, we propose a novel online self-assessment method using subjective logic, which is a modern extension of probabilistic logic that explicitly models the statistical uncertainty. Thus, by embedding classical Kalman filtering into subjective logic, our method additionally features an explicit measure for statistical uncertainty in the self-assessment.

Andreas Danzer, Thomas Griebel, Martin Bach et al.

For many automated driving functions, a highly accurate perception of the vehicle environment is a crucial prerequisite. Modern high-resolution radar sensors generate multiple radar targets per object, which makes these sensors particularly suitable for the 2D object detection task. This work presents an approach to detect 2D objects solely depending on sparse radar data using PointNets. In literature, only methods are presented so far which perform either object classification or bounding box estimation for objects. In contrast, this method facilitates a classification together with a bounding box estimation of objects using a single radar sensor. To this end, PointNets are adjusted for radar data performing 2D object classification with segmentation, and 2D bounding box regression in order to estimate an amodal 2D bounding box. The algorithm is evaluated using an automatically created dataset which consist of various realistic driving maneuvers. The results show the great potential of object detection in high-resolution radar data using PointNets.