Availability-aware Sensor Fusion via Unified Canonical Space
Dong-Hee Paek, SEUNG-HYUN KONG
Sensor fusion of camera, LiDAR, and 4-dimensional (4D) Radar has brought a significant performance improvement in autonomous driving (AD). However, there still exist fundamental challenges: deeply coupled fusion methods assume continuous sensor availability, making them vulnerable to sensor degradation and failure, whereas sensor-wise cross-attention fusion methods struggle with computational cost and unified feature representation. This paper presents availability-aware sensor fusion (ASF), a novel method that employs unified canonical projection (UCP) to enable consistency in all sensor features for fusion and cross-attention across sensors along patches (CASAP) to enhance robustness of sensor fusion against sensor degradation and failure. As a result, the proposed ASF shows a superior object detection performance to the existing state-of-the-art fusion methods under various weather and sensor degradation (or failure)  conditions; Extensive experiments on the K-Radar dataset demonstrate that ASF achieves improvements of 9.7\% in $AP_{BEV}$ (87.2\%) and 20.1\% in $AP_{3D}$ (73.6\%) in object detection at IoU=0.5, while requiring a low computational cost. The code for this work will be made publicly available following the completion of the review process.