https://github.com/sanjay-810/SAVID}
The fusion of LiDAR and camera sensors has demonstrated significant effectiveness in achieving accurate detection for short-range tasks in autonomous driving. However, this fusion approach could face challenges when dealing with long-range detection scenarios due to disparity between sparsity of LiDAR and high-resolution camera data. Moreover, sensor corruption introduces complexities that affect the ability to maintain robustness, despite the growing adoption of sensor fusion in this domain. We present SaViD, a novel framework comprised of a three-stage fusion alignment mechanism designed to address long-range detection challenges in the presence of natural corruption. The SaViD framework consists of three key elements: the Global Memory Attention Network (GMAN), which enhances the extraction of image features through offering a deeper understanding of global patterns; the Attentional Sparse Memory Network (ASMN), which enhances the integration of LiDAR and image features; and the KNNnectivity Graph Fusion (KGF), which enables the entire fusion of spatial information. SaViD achieves superior performance on the long-range detection Argoverse-2 (AV2) dataset with a performance improvement of 9.87% in AP value and an improvement of 2.39% in mAPH for L2 difficulties on the Waymo Open dataset (WOD). Comprehensive experiments are carried out to showcase its robustness against 14 natural sensor corruptions. SaViD exhibits a robust performance improvement of 31.43% for AV2 and 16.13% for WOD in RCE value compared to other existing fusion-based methods while considering all the corruptions for both datasets. Our code is available at \href{