Seeing Around Street Corners: Non-Line-of-Sight Detection and Tracking In-the-Wild Using Doppler Radar

Nicolas Scheiner, Florian Kraus, Fangyin Wei, Buu Phan, Fahim Mannan, Nils Appenrodt, Werner Ritter, Jurgen Dickmann, Klaus Dietmayer, Bernhard Sick, Felix Heide; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 2068-2077

Conventional sensor systems record information about directly visible objects, whereas occluded scene components are considered lost in the measurement process. Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) methods try to recover such hidden objects from their indirect reflections - faint signal components, traditionally treated as measurement noise. Existing NLOS approaches struggle to record these low-signal components outside the lab, and do not scale to large-scale outdoor scenes and high-speed motion, typical in automotive scenarios. In particular, optical NLOS capture is fundamentally limited by the quartic intensity falloff of diffuse indirect reflections. In this work, we depart from visible-wavelength approaches and demonstrate detection, classification, and tracking of hidden objects in large-scale dynamic environments using Doppler radars that can be manufactured at low-cost in series production. To untangle noisy indirect and direct reflections, we learn from temporal sequences of Doppler velocity and position measurements, which we fuse in a joint NLOS detection and tracking network over time. We validate the approach on in-the-wild automotive scenes, including sequences of parked cars or house facades as relay surfaces, and demonstrate low-cost, real-time NLOS in dynamic automotive environments.