MSDNet: Efficient 4D Radar Super-Resolution via Multi-Stage Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Minqing, Lu, Shouyi, Zheng, Boyuan, Li, Ziyao, Tang, Xiao, Zhuo, Guirong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Minqing
Lu, Shouyi
Zheng, Boyuan
Li, Ziyao
Tang, Xiao
Zhuo, Guirong
author_facet Huang, Minqing
Lu, Shouyi
Zheng, Boyuan
Li, Ziyao
Tang, Xiao
Zhuo, Guirong
contents 4D radar super-resolution, which aims to reconstruct sparse and noisy point clouds into dense and geometrically consistent representations, is a foundational problem in autonomous perception. However, existing methods often suffer from high training cost or rely on complex diffusion-based sampling, resulting in high inference latency and poor generalization, making it difficult to balance accuracy and efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose MSDNet, a multi-stage distillation framework that efficiently transfers dense LiDAR priors to 4D radar features to achieve both high reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. The first stage performs reconstruction-guided feature distillation, aligning and densifying the student's features through feature reconstruction. In the second stage, we propose diffusion-guided feature distillation, which treats the stage-one distilled features as a noisy version of the teacher's representations and refines them via a lightweight diffusion network. Furthermore, we introduce a noise adapter that adaptively aligns the noise level of the feature with a predefined diffusion timestep, enabling a more precise denoising. Extensive experiments on the VoD and in-house datasets demonstrate that MSDNet achieves both high-fidelity reconstruction and low-latency inference in the task of 4D radar point cloud super-resolution, and consistently improves performance on downstream tasks. The code will be publicly available upon publication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13149
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MSDNet: Efficient 4D Radar Super-Resolution via Multi-Stage Distillation
Huang, Minqing
Lu, Shouyi
Zheng, Boyuan
Li, Ziyao
Tang, Xiao
Zhuo, Guirong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
4D radar super-resolution, which aims to reconstruct sparse and noisy point clouds into dense and geometrically consistent representations, is a foundational problem in autonomous perception. However, existing methods often suffer from high training cost or rely on complex diffusion-based sampling, resulting in high inference latency and poor generalization, making it difficult to balance accuracy and efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose MSDNet, a multi-stage distillation framework that efficiently transfers dense LiDAR priors to 4D radar features to achieve both high reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. The first stage performs reconstruction-guided feature distillation, aligning and densifying the student's features through feature reconstruction. In the second stage, we propose diffusion-guided feature distillation, which treats the stage-one distilled features as a noisy version of the teacher's representations and refines them via a lightweight diffusion network. Furthermore, we introduce a noise adapter that adaptively aligns the noise level of the feature with a predefined diffusion timestep, enabling a more precise denoising. Extensive experiments on the VoD and in-house datasets demonstrate that MSDNet achieves both high-fidelity reconstruction and low-latency inference in the task of 4D radar point cloud super-resolution, and consistently improves performance on downstream tasks. The code will be publicly available upon publication.
title MSDNet: Efficient 4D Radar Super-Resolution via Multi-Stage Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13149