Perception is a fundamental component of autonomous and self-driving vehicles, with reliable object detection and understanding of the environment being critical for safe operation. While lidar and camera based systems are widely used, radar remains a promising option due to its
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Perception is a fundamental component of autonomous and self-driving vehicles, with reliable object detection and understanding of the environment being critical for safe operation. While lidar and camera based systems are widely used, radar remains a promising option due to its robustness in poor weather conditions and ability to directly measure the radial velocity of objects via the Doppler effect. However, radar’s sparse data and resulting limitations have constrained its potential. This thesis investigates the use of dual automotive radar setups to mitigate these limitations, and use the specific advantages of such a setup to improve full velocity vector estimation methods. A novel algorithm is proposed to achieve more accurate velocity estimation in non-ideal, real world conditions. The work further explores how improved velocity estimation can be used to improve classification performance using graph neural networks. Here it was found that including velocity information via a ground truth method did increase classification performance significantly, though the same result could not be obtained via the previously mentioned velocity estimation method. To support evaluation, a simplified simulation environment and ground truth velocity data for the RadarScenes dataset are developed. This research aims to close the performance gap between radar and other more data-dense sensors, offering a robust and more cost effective alternative, especially in conditions where optical systems under perform.