Graph Theoretical Outlier Rejection for 4D Radar Registration in Feature-Poor Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graph-based outlier rejection method for 4D radar scan registration in feature-scarce environments, enhancing robustness and accuracy in challenging conditions.

Contribution

It proposes a radar-adapted pairwise consistency maximization approach integrated into ICP, with a greedy heuristic for efficient outlier rejection in 4D radar registration.

Findings

Reduces position error by up to 55% in open-pit mine data

Incorporates anisotropic, uncertainty-aware scoring for improved outlier detection

Demonstrates suitability for online localization in feature-poor environments

Abstract

Automotive 4D imaging radar is well suited for operation in dusty and low-visibility environments, but scan registration remains challenging due to scan sparsity and spurious detections caused by noise and multipath reflections. This difficulty is compounded in feature-poor open-pit mines, where the lack of distinctive landmarks reduces correspondence reliability. We integrate graph-based pairwise consistency maximization (PCM) as an outlier rejection step within the iterative closest points (ICP) loop. We propose a radar-adapted pairwise distance-invariant scoring function for graph-based (PCM) that incorporates anisotropic, per-detection uncertainty derived from a radar measurement model. The consistency maximization problem is approximated with a greedy heuristic that finds a large clique in the pairwise consistency graph. The refined correspondence set improves robustness when the initial association set is heavily contaminated. We evaluate a standard Euclidean distance residual and our uncertainty-aware residual on an open-pit mine dataset collected with a 4D imaging radar. Compared to the generalized ICP (GICP) baseline without PCM, our method reduces segment relative position error (RPE) by 29.6% on 1 m segments and by up to 55% on 100 m segments. The presented method is intended for integration into localization pipelines and is suitable for online use due to the greedy heuristic in graph-based (PCM).