For autonomous vehicles to be able to operate successfully they need to be
aware of other vehicles with sufficient time to make safe, stable plans. Given
the possible closing speeds between two vehicles, this necessitates the ability
to accurately detect distant vehicles. Many current image-based object
detectors using convolutional neural networks exhibit excellent performance on
existing datasets such as KITTI. However, the performance of these networks
falls when detecting small (distant) objects. We demonstrate that incorporating
radar data can boost performance in these difficult situations. We also
introduce an efficient automated method for training data generation using
cameras of different focal lengths