Amira Mimouna

The development of safe intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has driven extensive research to come up with efficient environment perception techniques with a variety of sensors. In short range settings, Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) radars represent a promising technology for building reliable obstacle detection systems as they are robust to environmental conditions. However, UWB radars suffer from a segmentation challenge: localizing relevant regions of interest (ROIs) within its signals. This paper proposes a segmentation approach to detect ROIs in an environment perception-dedicated UWB radar. Specifically, we implement a differential entropy analysis to detect ROIs. We evaluate our technique on a benchmark of more than 47 thousands samples. The obtained results show higher performance in terms of obstacle detection compared to state-of-the-art techniques, and a stable robustness even with low amplitude signals.

A reliable environment perception is a crucial task for autonomous driving, especially in dense traffic areas. Recent improvements and breakthroughs in scene understanding for intelligent transportation systems are mainly based on deep learning and the fusion of different modalities. In this context, we introduce OLIMP: A heterOgeneous Multimodal Dataset for Advanced EnvIronMent Perception. This is the first public, multimodal and synchronized dataset that includes UWB radar data, acoustic data, narrow-band radar data and images. OLIMP comprises 407 scenes and 47,354 synchronized frames, presenting four categories: pedestrian, cyclist, car and tram. The dataset includes various challenges related to dense urban traffic such as cluttered environment and different weather conditions. To demonstrate the usefulness of the introduced dataset, we propose a fusion framework that combines the four modalities for multi object detection. The obtained results are promising and spur for future research.