Class-Aware PillarMix: Can Mixed Sample Data Augmentation Enhance 3D Object Detection with Radar Point Clouds?

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Main Authors: Zhang, Miao, Abdulatif, Sherif, Loesch, Benedikt, Altmann, Marco, Yang, Bin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Miao
Abdulatif, Sherif
Loesch, Benedikt
Altmann, Marco
Yang, Bin
author_facet Zhang, Miao
Abdulatif, Sherif
Loesch, Benedikt
Altmann, Marco
Yang, Bin
contents Due to the significant effort required for data collection and annotation in 3D perception tasks, mixed sample data augmentation (MSDA) has been widely studied to generate diverse training samples by mixing existing data. Recently, many MSDA techniques have been developed for point clouds, but they mainly target LiDAR data, leaving their application to radar point clouds largely unexplored. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of applying existing MSDA methods to radar point clouds and identify several challenges in adapting these techniques. These obstacles stem from the radar's irregular angular distribution, deviations from a single-sensor polar layout in multi-radar setups, and point sparsity. To address these issues, we propose Class-Aware PillarMix (CAPMix), a novel MSDA approach that applies MixUp at the pillar level in 3D point clouds, guided by class labels. Unlike methods that rely a single mix ratio to the entire sample, CAPMix assigns an independent ratio to each pillar, boosting sample diversity. To account for the density of different classes, we use class-specific distributions: for dense objects (e.g., large vehicles), we skew ratios to favor points from another sample, while for sparse objects (e.g., pedestrians), we sample more points from the original. This class-aware mixing retains critical details and enriches each sample with new information, ultimately generating more diverse training data. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only significantly boosts performance but also outperforms existing MSDA approaches across two datasets (Bosch Street and K-Radar). We believe that this straightforward yet effective approach will spark further investigation into MSDA techniques for radar data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_02687
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Class-Aware PillarMix: Can Mixed Sample Data Augmentation Enhance 3D Object Detection with Radar Point Clouds?
Zhang, Miao
Abdulatif, Sherif
Loesch, Benedikt
Altmann, Marco
Yang, Bin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
Due to the significant effort required for data collection and annotation in 3D perception tasks, mixed sample data augmentation (MSDA) has been widely studied to generate diverse training samples by mixing existing data. Recently, many MSDA techniques have been developed for point clouds, but they mainly target LiDAR data, leaving their application to radar point clouds largely unexplored. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of applying existing MSDA methods to radar point clouds and identify several challenges in adapting these techniques. These obstacles stem from the radar's irregular angular distribution, deviations from a single-sensor polar layout in multi-radar setups, and point sparsity. To address these issues, we propose Class-Aware PillarMix (CAPMix), a novel MSDA approach that applies MixUp at the pillar level in 3D point clouds, guided by class labels. Unlike methods that rely a single mix ratio to the entire sample, CAPMix assigns an independent ratio to each pillar, boosting sample diversity. To account for the density of different classes, we use class-specific distributions: for dense objects (e.g., large vehicles), we skew ratios to favor points from another sample, while for sparse objects (e.g., pedestrians), we sample more points from the original. This class-aware mixing retains critical details and enriches each sample with new information, ultimately generating more diverse training data. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only significantly boosts performance but also outperforms existing MSDA approaches across two datasets (Bosch Street and K-Radar). We believe that this straightforward yet effective approach will spark further investigation into MSDA techniques for radar data.
title Class-Aware PillarMix: Can Mixed Sample Data Augmentation Enhance 3D Object Detection with Radar Point Clouds?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02687