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

arXiv:2509.18068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Millimeter-wave radar provides robust perception in fog, smoke, dust, and low light, making it attractive for size-, weight-, and power-constrained robotic platforms. Existing radar imaging methods typically 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 state-of-the-art performance against baseline models. 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 a practical single-frame, no-SAR mmWave radar pipeline for dense point cloud perception in compact robotic systems.

Abstract:Millimeter-wave radar provides robust perception in fog, smoke, dust, and low light, making it attractive for size-, weight-, and power-constrained robotic platforms. Existing radar imaging methods typically 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 state-of-the-art performance against baseline models. 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 a practical single-frame, no-SAR mmWave radar pipeline for dense point cloud perception in compact robotic systems.

Accepted to the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026). Project page: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Signal Processing (eess.SP)

arXiv:2509.18068 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2509.18068v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.18068 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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

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