RadarSFD: Single-Frame Diffusion with Pretrained Priors for Radar Point Clouds

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Bin, Garg, Nakul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Bin
Garg, Nakul
author_facet Zhao, Bin
Garg, Nakul
contents Millimeter-wave radar provides perception robust to fog, smoke, dust, and low light, making it attractive for size, weight, and power constrained robotic platforms. Current radar imaging methods, however, rely on synthetic aperture or multi-frame aggregation to improve resolution, which is impractical for small aerial, inspection, or wearable systems. We present RadarSFD, a conditional latent diffusion framework that reconstructs dense LiDAR-like point clouds from a single radar frame without motion or SAR. Our approach transfers geometric priors from a pretrained monocular depth estimator into the diffusion backbone, anchors them to radar inputs via channel-wise latent concatenation, and regularizes outputs with a dual-space objective combining latent and pixel-space losses. On the RadarHD benchmark, RadarSFD achieves 35 cm Chamfer Distance and 28 cm Modified Hausdorff Distance, improving over the single-frame RadarHD baseline (56 cm, 45 cm) and remaining competitive with multi-frame methods using 5-41 frames. Qualitative results show recovery of fine walls and narrow gaps, and experiments across new environments confirm strong generalization. Ablation studies highlight the importance of pretrained initialization, radar BEV conditioning, and the dual-space loss. Together, these results establish the first practical single-frame, no-SAR mmWave radar pipeline for dense point cloud perception in compact robotic systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RadarSFD: Single-Frame Diffusion with Pretrained Priors for Radar Point Clouds
Zhao, Bin
Garg, Nakul
Robotics
Signal Processing
Millimeter-wave radar provides perception robust to fog, smoke, dust, and low light, making it attractive for size, weight, and power constrained robotic platforms. Current radar imaging methods, however, rely on synthetic aperture or multi-frame aggregation to improve resolution, which is impractical for small aerial, inspection, or wearable systems. We present RadarSFD, a conditional latent diffusion framework that reconstructs dense LiDAR-like point clouds from a single radar frame without motion or SAR. Our approach transfers geometric priors from a pretrained monocular depth estimator into the diffusion backbone, anchors them to radar inputs via channel-wise latent concatenation, and regularizes outputs with a dual-space objective combining latent and pixel-space losses. On the RadarHD benchmark, RadarSFD achieves 35 cm Chamfer Distance and 28 cm Modified Hausdorff Distance, improving over the single-frame RadarHD baseline (56 cm, 45 cm) and remaining competitive with multi-frame methods using 5-41 frames. Qualitative results show recovery of fine walls and narrow gaps, and experiments across new environments confirm strong generalization. Ablation studies highlight the importance of pretrained initialization, radar BEV conditioning, and the dual-space loss. Together, these results establish the first practical single-frame, no-SAR mmWave radar pipeline for dense point cloud perception in compact robotic systems.
title RadarSFD: Single-Frame Diffusion with Pretrained Priors for Radar Point Clouds
topic Robotics
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18068