R2P: A Deep Learning Model from mmWave Radar to Point Cloud

Abstract: Recent research has shown the effectiveness of mmWave radar sensing for object detection in low visibility environments, which makes it an ideal technique in autonomous navigation systems. In this paper, we introduce Radar to Point Cloud (R2P), a deep learning model that generates smooth, dense, and highly accurate point cloud representation of a 3D object with fine geometry details, based on rough and sparse point clouds with incorrect points obtained from mmWave radar. These input point clouds are converted from the 2D depth images that are generated from raw mmWave radar sensor data, characterized by inconsistency, and orientation and shape errors. R2P utilizes an architecture of two sequential deep learning encoder-decoder blocks to extract the essential features of those radar-based input point clouds of an object when observed from multiple viewpoints, and to ensure the internal consistency of a generated output point cloud and its accurate and detailed shape reconstruction of the original object. We implement R2P to replace Stage 2 of our recently proposed 3DRIMR (3D Reconstruction and Imaging via mmWave Radar) system. Our experiments demonstrate the significant performance improvement of R2P over the popular existing methods such as PointNet, PCN, and the original 3DRIMR design.