XPRESS: X-Band Radar Place Recognition via Elliptical Scan Shaping

TL;DR

This paper introduces XPRESS, a novel X-band radar place recognition algorithm designed for maritime autonomous navigation, utilizing object density rules and detection degradation to improve robustness and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a tailored place recognition algorithm for X-band radar in maritime environments, incorporating object density-based candidate selection and detection degradation techniques.

Findings

Outperforms existing radar place recognition methods on maritime datasets

Demonstrates robustness to sensor resolution limitations

Shows effectiveness of object density rules and detection degradation

Abstract

X-band radar serves as the primary sensor on maritime vessels, however, its application in autonomous navigation has been limited due to low sensor resolution and insufficient information content. To enable X-band radar-only autonomous navigation in maritime environments, this paper proposes a place recognition algorithm specifically tailored for X-band radar, incorporating an object density-based rule for efficient candidate selection and intentional degradation of radar detections to achieve robust retrieval performance. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on both public maritime radar datasets and our own collected dataset, and its performance was compared against state-of-the-art radar place recognition methods. An ablation study was conducted to assess the algorithm's performance sensitivity with respect to key parameters.