# REFNet++: Multi-Task Efficient Fusion of Camera and Radar Sensor Data in Bird's-Eye Polar View

Source: [REFNet++: Multi-Task Efficient Fusion of Camera and Radar Sensor Data in Bird's-Eye Polar View](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/6a04059adbc836b87d827572>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-05-14T05:00:13.174Z

Authors: Kavin Chandrasekaran, Sorin Grigorescu, Gijs Dubbelman, Pavol Jancura

Published: 2026-05-12T09:13:02.000Z

## Abstract

A realistic view of the vehicle's surroundings is generally offered by camera sensors, which is crucial for environmental perception. Affordable radar sensors, on the other hand, are becoming invaluable due to their robustness in variable weather conditions. However, because of their noisy output and reduced classification capability, they work best when combined with other sensor data. Specifically, we address the challenge of multimodal sensor fusion by aligning radar and camera data in a unified domain, prioritizing not only accuracy, but also computational efficiency. Our work leverages the raw range-Doppler (RD) spectrum from radar and front-view camera images as inputs. To enable effective fusion, we employ a variational encoder-decoder architecture that learns the transformation of front-view camera data into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV) polar domain. Concurrently, a radar encoder-decoder learns to recover the angle information from the RD data that produce Range-Azimuth (RA) features. This alignment ensures that both modalities are represented in a compatible domain, facilitating robust and efficient sensor fusion. We evaluated our fusion strategy for vehicle detection and free space segmentation against state-of-the-art methods using the RADIal dataset.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Free space segmentation on RADIal (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/free-space-segmentation-on-radial-test.md>): Free space segmentation; RADIal (test); mIoU: 88.13.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11824>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.11824.pdf>)