Advanced Radar Features

and Improved Machine

Learning Model for Ground
Object Classification in
Autonomous Driving
Akash Nebhwani, Arifa M
Radar Sensing Department,Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Continental Automotive Components (India) Pvt. Ltd., Bengaluru
akash.suresh.nebhwani@continental-corporation.com

section is reflected.There are two paths a reflected ray

Abstract
will take.
This paper proposes a radar based, a machine learning model for Direct path which has high RCS and indirect path with
classification of Ground objects for Advanced Driver Assistance low RCS.Cone reflectors gives the most reflection with
Systems (ADAS). The framework for the proposal includes same strength as incident ray(no loss). Ground object
collecting data from different objects such as ground objects,
won't be able to reflect much,resulting in a less
obstacles etc.,labelling them with their respective classes,
analysis of this data to identify various features from which the
RCS,which helps us in further categorizing.i.e,less RCS
appropriate features are selected that’ll help distinguish between
are weak objects and high RCS are strong objects.And
the classes. Algorithm is trained with these features and the KPI also a straight surface will reflect less whereas a curved
is measured to check the accuracy thus improving the surface can reflect more.When an ego speed is low,more
performance of ADAS frequency is got and viceversa.When a car approaches a
target on the road,the radar will help record all the data
Keywords - ADAS, Radar, Ground object, Machine Learning associated with the target such as the lateral and
longitudinal distances,velocity from which we’d use the
Distance X and RCS to do the classification. For Ground
I. INTRODUCTION objects,When the distance decreases,there is a linear
increase in the RCS trend and after reaching a particular
maximum value,RCS gradually drops .In case of Non-
1 Motivation
Ground objects,Oscillation patterns are seen as the
distance decreases and as distance decreases,frequency of
The classification of Objects on the roads ahead of an Oscillations increase.It is to be kept in mind,RCS is
autonomous vehicle is essential to operate in safety. On higher for Obstacles compared to that of Ground objects.
roads we would constantly come across different objects Ideally,Non-Ground Object can be detected at a far
that are made of different materials varying in size, distance in comparison to Ground Object and Non-
shapes etc., It is essential to correctly classify these Ground Object escalates to a maximum RCS value at far
objects into obstacles and ground objects, with precise distance.
confidence, so as to avoid false brakes. The radar for the
purpose is of 83 x 69 x 22 mm with a field of view of ±
4° 200m (220m typ.) / ± 9° 120m / ± 45° 40 …70m that
has the capability to carry the sufficient information
required for the classification. A proper understanding of
the classes are needed.There are two main divisions in
classes,Ground objects(GO) and Non-ground
objects(NGO)/Obstacles.Ground objects are those which
are over-rideables and doesn’t hinder the smooth driving
of a vehiclewhere in as Non-ground objects are those that
can’t be driven over that can trigger the braking action.
There’s a variety of Objects that comes under these
classes and corner cases where the classifier has trouble
working in normal functionality,hence challenging.
Radar cross- section is the capability of a target/object to
reflect the radar signals in the direction of the receiver.It
defines the detectability of an object ,higher the RCS
is,higher the detectability is.Radar cross-section
elucidates the difference between the reflected signals’
strength from a target to the same from a smooth sphere Figure 1: RCS over the range for a ground object
of cross sectional area of 1 sq m. Some targets have large (blue line) and a vehicle(black line)
values of RCS owing to their size and orientation and
consequently reflect a large portion of incident
power.Radar cross section tells us how much cross
2 Paper Structure

This paper is organized as follows: in section II System

implementation is presented, in section III Results are
discussed and section IV ends the paper with Conclusion
and Future works.

II. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

1 Data Extraction

The data recorded by the Radar needs to be extracted into

a more accessible form so it can be used in further
task.The data is extracted with the help of a Database to
make further analysis of data easier.Database is where the
information is collected and organized.This makes it
easier to access,update and manage.Databases are mainly
of SQL based and Non-SQL based.SQL based databases
are stored as instances that has a structure of Tables
further divided into rows and columns.Oracle DB and
MYSQL are some examples for these types of
Databases.For this work,Non-SQL database Mongo DB
is used.The instances in Mongo DB are stored as
Collections and further divided into Documents.They are
in the form of a Dictionary.
A data directory needs to be created at first to store the
data. Then a server is set up and required to establish a
connection to upload the binary signals generated from
the radar.With the help of Robo3T,which acts as an
interface between the user and the server acting as a Figure 2:Process chain for enhanced feature calculation
bridge, a connection is set up. A Radar labelling tool kit
assists in uploading the binary signal data into server via
python programming. the range at which the maximum value is
observed.Typical maximum value and position observed
in an ideal ground object varies from that of a non-ground
Once the frames and datas are uploaded into the server object.
and are available in an user friendly accessible format,the RCS Maximum change count: This is an important
next step is to update the labels. The classes under ground feature as it can be seen in the pattern of RCS for ground
object and non-object are defined in the scripts and it and non-ground object ,that for an ideal ground object an
helps in labeling the classes properly. increasing RCS trend is observed.RCS Maximum change
When executed,a new field is added named ’annotations’ count is the counter which is updated every time a new
where all the objects would be listed and labeled with RCS maximum is observed proving to be a differentiating
their respective valid class names or background or noise feature for ground vs non-ground object classification.
if they are will be added. Maximum RCS interval: This is a second order derived
feature, which depicts the distance between two
2 Feature Generation consecutive RCS maxima.”RCS Maximu change count”
has a limitation for objects created at near distance due to
The Least Square Fit(LSF) algorithm helps in finding curves , obscured scenarios,etc.however Max RCS
features that can be used to classify the objects.LSF is interval feature can be exploited for classification in such
solely based on linear regression that is to fit a line close chlenging scenarios and corner cases.
to the values that has a minimized error.Less error would
be of a ground object while more error is obstacle.
Regarding the plot,nearly below 25m,there's not much
difference between obstacle and ground object,therefore
less probability from indirect path so we use LSF near for
accurate classification and 25 m to 100 m shows
considerable difference.Hence 2 observers are being
used.LSF near keeps resetting at all new maximum values
of RCS. LSFFar stands for the LSF that deals with all the
detections taken from the first detection and LSFNear is
that detection that starts with the first detection but resets
every time a new global maximum of RCS is detected.
Some of the new features derived are as follows:
RCS Maximum Value and Position: With every cycle of
approach Maximum RCS value is updated along with
Figure 3: RCS over the range for a ground object indicating Maximum
RCS values and Position along with the Maximum RCS interval
features.

Figure 4: RCS over the range for a vehicle indicating
Maximum RCS Values and Position along with
Maximum RCS interval features.
3 Feature Analysis
The features we have derived from the earlier steps are
now undergone analysis.This is necessary because some
features are correlated,which means that the features
might have same information.They need to be removed
since they basically carry the same data.Removing them
can help in maximizing the performance with a reduced
computation.Less running time and less memory
consumption.This is why feature analysis is an important
step in the process and the feature selection is done
adequately.
4 Feauture Selection
With a lot of ways to generate new features, one might be
allured to boost the dimensionality of the data set more
than the number of original available features. But
addition of more features will lead for a more complex
model,and thus escalates the chances of overfitting.When
new features are added ,specifically at a high dimensional
dataset ,it’s better to reduce the number of features into
the most relevant ones and dispense the rest of the
features.This results in getting a simple model which can
help the generalization better. There are mainly three
ways to do feature selection:
Univariate Selection,Model-based Selection and Iterative
Selection.All of these three methods are supervised
learning techniques,which means they require a target so
that they can fit in. And it requires for the data to be split
into two,I.e, training dataset and testing dataset and fit the
feature selection into the training dataset.
5 Pipeline
In case of machine learning,a standard procedure needs
to be followed inorder to compare the outcomes with that
of various models.So it is more sensible to make a
pipeline and using it.One such pipe line is given below.To
add scikit-learn already have an implemented
pipeline.[pip-git].Yet inorder to follow a standard method
sklearn pipeline is used(scikit-learn principle).
Figure 5: Implementation of an End-to-End ML
pipeline.
The pipeline takes raw labeled data as input and provides
trained model along side all the possible performance
measures as output. It also takes care of hyperparameter
tuning inherently. Pipeline returns Train Accuracy,
Validation- Accuracy, Best Parameters, Test Accuracy,
Nos. Of misclassified instances, Confusion- Matrix and
such. In addition to all or any usual performance
measures, pipeline also returns few application specific
measures, out of which most interesting is plot for
misclassified signals.
5.1 Data split
Albeit the task is simply binary classification, the dataset
is unbalanced and consists of approaches to differing
types of object. Therefore, the splitting strategy is a
crucial think about what and the way the model learns. to
not mention, this directly changes the performance of the
model. In scikit-learn several methods are available to
separate the info . Scikit-learn official documentation
explains then well [skl-split]. Not of these split strategies
are applicable / justifiable for the task. Therefore, Manual
(handpicked), StratifiedShuffleSplit, GroupKFold and
StratifiedKFold splits are considered for the analysis.
Grid search is that the process of performing hyper
parameter tuning so as to work out the optimal values for
a given model. This is important since the performance of
the model depend on the hyper parameter values
specified. it is hard to stipulate values for hyper
parameters. There are libraries that are implemented, like
GridSearchCV of the sklearn library, so as to automate
this process and make life a touch bit easier for ML
enthusiasts.
5.2 Hyper Parameter tuning
When creating a machine learning model, you will be
presented with design choices on the way to define your
model architecture. Often times, we do not immediately
know what the optimal model architecture should be for
a given model, and thus we'd wish to be ready to explore
a variety of possibilities. In a perfect machine learning
environment, we expect the machine to perform this
exploration and choose the optimal model architecture on
it's own. Parameters which define the model architecture
are mentioned as hyperparameters and thus this process
of checking out the perfect model architecture is
mentioned as hyperparameter tuning.
One of the foremost important aspects when training
neural networks is avoiding overfitting. Overfitting refers
to the phenomenon where a neural network models the
training data alright but fails when it sees new data from
an equivalent problem domain. Overfitting is caused by
noise within the training data that the neural network
picks up during training and learns it as an underlying
concept of the info .Regularization refers to a group of
various techniques that lower the complexity of a neural
network model during training, and thus prevent the
overfitting.
There are mainly two types of regularization called
• L1 Regularization
• L2 Regularization
III. RESULTS
Results are simulated for ground objects and non ground
objects of varied classes such as Car to Car scenarios,
Muffler, Muffler with tube, Metal Plate, Potato chips bag,
Short Ratchet strap, Small plastic box, Tin can, Wooden
pallet, Adult Dummy, Child Dummy, Large tire with rim,
Steel catalytic converter, Manhole cover, Long Metal
profile, L profile and Mercedes E class.
The data consists of a number of different classes and a
variety of approaches.The objects from LC are harder to
classify and that complicates functioning of classifier.So
care is to be taken in splitting up of the data and balancing
properly into training data and testing data.Developing
more features are yet another solution.
The Histogram shows a feature can define a boundary
between the ground objects and non ground objects,(here
the usecase 0 represents ground objects and viceversa).A
single feature cannot properly distinguish between the
ground object and non-ground object and hence we
consider other features for training a reliable model.
Figure 6: Class wise histogram for a single feature
When feature selection step is triggered,the program
takes all the features,individually and combined with the
features and does feature selection in all the three
methods we mentioned i.e., in univariate,model-based
and iterative feature selection method at different ranges
of distance ranges.The result is generated in an excel
format.Table 5.1 shows the feature selection done using
two original features
The accuracy when a single feature is considered is
different from when both the features were used and that
varies over each ranges of distances considered.The KPI
is found to be improving when there is a combination of
features used together rather than using a single
feature.And also further analysis will show some
combination of feature doesn’t necessarily increase the
test accuracy which means they are only informative
when combined with another feature or in simple words
their presence doesn’t improve the accuracy or reliability
of the system which help us to come to a conclusion on
which features need to be used and which needs to be
disregarded.It is clear that along different ranges,for the
three different methods,the features selected and their
combination are different,And they are so selected that
the particular combination gives the maximum accuracy
for the model.
Figure 7: Feature selection by three methods.
With the selected features,a model has been built and
coefficients for the features and intercept values are
extracted.
Figure 8: Model Generation
IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
This thesis goes through various important steps, In
conclusion in this work, Logistic regression is used as ML
model and for testing and training the data and to get an
accuracy value,thus the performance.An end to end
pipeline is designed which takes in the raw data as the
input and produces a trained classifier with best
parameter.This along with the result has measures of the
performance constitutes the output.The design of this
pipeline has steps such as data analysis and
extraction,which extracts the radar data in a more user
friendly,easily accessible format,feature analysis and
feature selection where we select the features used for
training,disregarding the rest with the help of three
methods such as univariate,model-based and iterative
feature selection. And hyperparameter tuning with the
help of grid-search and documentation.
There are a lot many opportunities and possibilities to
further extend this work and hence improve the model
performance.One is to introduce data augmentation with
models like Ada-Boost, Gradient-Boosting, Decision
Tree etc and to analyze the results for a better accurate
model.
Another future scope is to implement a multi-class
classifier with classes such as GO,NGO,Probably
GO,Probably NGO and so on.This increases the
reliability and confidence the system.Develop pipeline
for a generalization so that it helps in other applications
other than Ground-Object Classification.

ACKNOWLEDGEM
ENTS

REFERENCES

. BIODATA OF AUTHORS