An apparatus for determining ego-motion

An apparatus for determining ego-motion of a radar apparatus, the apparatus comprising one or more processors configured to:

• receive radar-point-cloud information, the radar-point-cloud information comprising a plurality of points determined by the radar apparatus indicative of one or more objects in a space at a single time point, wherein each point of the plurality of points is characterized by a plurality of features comprising at least a Doppler velocity measurement indicative of the velocity of the point and an angle-of-arrival measurement indicative of the angle to the point from a reference direction of the radar apparatus;
• provide for processing of the radar-point-cloud information, the processing comprising:
• (1) for each point of the radar-point-cloud information, mapping the features thereof to a greater number of mapped-features to provide mapped-radar-point-cloud information using a first neural network comprising a shared-multilayer-perceptron, SMLP, encoder;
• (2) receiving the mapped-radar-point-cloud information and, based on thereon, determining a global feature vector indicative of one or more characteristics of the mapped-radar-point-cloud information using a second neural network comprising an average pooling layer;
• (3) generating a feature matrix representing each of the points, wherein each point therein is characterized by a feature-set based on a combination of:
• i) the features from the radar-point-cloud information,
• ii) the mapped-features from the mapped-radar-point-cloud information and
• iii) the global feature vector;
• (4) determining, using a further neural network, for each point,
• i) a pointwise-weight representing a likelihood that the point represents a stationary object in the space rather than a moving object in the space;
• and
• ii) a pointwise-offset comprising a correction to be applied to the Doppler velocity measurement to at least reduce the Doppler velocity measurement for points having a greater than expected Doppler velocity;
• and
• (5) providing an estimate of the motion of the radar apparatus indicative of at least two-dimensional motion based on the pointwise-weight and the pointwise-offset and the Doppler velocity measurements of the radar-point-cloud information.

A method for determining ego-motion of a radar apparatus, the method performed by one or more processors and comprising:

• receiving radar-point-cloud information, the radar-point-cloud information comprising a plurality of points determined by the radar apparatus indicative of one or more objects in a space at a single time point, wherein each point of the plurality of points is characterized by a plurality of features comprising at least a Doppler velocity measurement indicative of the velocity of the point and an angle-of-arrival measurement indicative of the angle to the point from a reference direction of the radar apparatus;
• using a first neural network comprising a shared-multilayer-perceptron, SMLP, encoder, for each point of the radar-point-cloud information, mapping the features thereof to a greater number of mapped-features to provide mapped-radar-point-cloud information;
• using a second neural network comprising an average pooling layer, receiving the mapped-radar-point-cloud information and, based on thereon, determining a global feature vector indicative of one or more characteristics of the mapped-radar-point-cloud information;
• generating a feature matrix representing each of the points, wherein each point therein is characterized by a feature-set based on a combination of:
• i) the features from the radar-point-cloud information, ii) the mapped-features from the mapped-radar-point-cloud information and
• iii) the global feature vector;
• and
• using a further neural network and determining, for each point,
• i) a pointwise-weight representing a likelihood that the point represents a stationary object in the space rather than a moving object in the space;
• ii) a pointwise-offset comprising a correction to be applied to the Doppler velocity measurement to at least reduce the Doppler velocity measurement for points having a greater than expected Doppler velocity;
• and
• providing an estimate of the motion of the radar apparatus indicative of at least two-dimensional motion based on the pointwisc-weight and the pointwise-offset and the Doppler velocity measurements of the radar-point-cloud information.