A Lightweight Model-Driven 4D Radar Framework for Pervasive Human Detection in Harsh Conditions

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Liu, Zhenan, Khajepour, Amir, Shaker, George
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866908775355514880
author Liu, Zhenan
Khajepour, Amir
Shaker, George
author_facet Liu, Zhenan
Khajepour, Amir
Shaker, George
contents Pervasive sensing in industrial and underground environments is severely constrained by airborne dust, smoke, confined geometry, and metallic structures, which rapidly degrade optical and LiDAR based perception. Elevation resolved 4D mmWave radar offers strong resilience to such conditions, yet there remains a limited understanding of how to process its sparse and anisotropic point clouds for reliable human detection in enclosed, visibility degraded spaces. This paper presents a fully model-driven 4D radar perception framework designed for real-time execution on embedded edge hardware. The system uses radar as its sole perception modality and integrates domain aware multi threshold filtering, ego motion compensated temporal accumulation, KD tree Euclidean clustering with Doppler aware refinement, and a rule based 3D classifier. The framework is evaluated in a dust filled enclosed trailer and in real underground mining tunnels, and in the tested scenarios the radar based detector maintains stable pedestrian identification as camera and LiDAR modalities fail under severe visibility degradation. These results suggest that the proposed model-driven approach provides robust, interpretable, and computationally efficient perception for safety-critical applications in harsh industrial and subterranean environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_13373
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Lightweight Model-Driven 4D Radar Framework for Pervasive Human Detection in Harsh Conditions
Liu, Zhenan
Khajepour, Amir
Shaker, George
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pervasive sensing in industrial and underground environments is severely constrained by airborne dust, smoke, confined geometry, and metallic structures, which rapidly degrade optical and LiDAR based perception. Elevation resolved 4D mmWave radar offers strong resilience to such conditions, yet there remains a limited understanding of how to process its sparse and anisotropic point clouds for reliable human detection in enclosed, visibility degraded spaces. This paper presents a fully model-driven 4D radar perception framework designed for real-time execution on embedded edge hardware. The system uses radar as its sole perception modality and integrates domain aware multi threshold filtering, ego motion compensated temporal accumulation, KD tree Euclidean clustering with Doppler aware refinement, and a rule based 3D classifier. The framework is evaluated in a dust filled enclosed trailer and in real underground mining tunnels, and in the tested scenarios the radar based detector maintains stable pedestrian identification as camera and LiDAR modalities fail under severe visibility degradation. These results suggest that the proposed model-driven approach provides robust, interpretable, and computationally efficient perception for safety-critical applications in harsh industrial and subterranean environments.
title A Lightweight Model-Driven 4D Radar Framework for Pervasive Human Detection in Harsh Conditions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13373