RC-AutoCalib: An End-to-End Radar-Camera Automatic Calibration Network

This paper presents a groundbreaking approach - the first online automatic geometric calibration method for radar and camera systems. Given the significant data sparsity and measurement uncertainty in radar height data, achieving automatic calibration during system operation has long been a challenge. To address the sparsity issue, we propose a Dual-Perspective representation that gathers features from both frontal and bird’s-eye views. The frontal view contains rich but sensitive height information, whereas the bird’s-eye view provides robust features against height uncertainty. We thereby propose a novel Selective Fusion Mechanism to identify and fuse reliable features from both perspectives, reducing the effect of height uncertainty. Moreover, for each view, we incorporate a Multi-Modal Cross-Attention Mechanism to explicitly find location correspondences through cross-modal matching. During the training phase, we also design a Noise-Resistant Matcher to provide better supervision and enhance the robustness of the matching mechanism against sparsity and height uncertainty. Our experimental results, tested on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous radar-camera auto-calibration methods, as well as existing state-of-the-art LiDAR-camera calibration techniques, establishing a new benchmark for future research.