Diffusion-Based mmWave Radar Point Cloud Enhancement Driven by Range Images

Abstract: Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has attracted significant attention in robotics and autonomous driving. However, despite the perception stability in harsh environments, the point cloud generated by mmWave radar is relatively sparse while containing significant noise, which limits its further development. Traditional mmWave radar enhancement approaches often struggle to leverage the effectiveness of diffusion models in super-resolution, largely due to the unnatural range-azimuth heatmap (RAH) or bird's eye view (BEV) representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method that pioneers the application of fusing range images with image diffusion models, achieving accurate and dense mmWave radar point clouds that are similar to LiDAR. Benefitting from the projection that aligns with human observation, the range image representation of mmWave radar is close to natural images, allowing the knowledge from pre-trained image diffusion models to be effectively transferred, significantly improving the overall performance. Extensive evaluations on both public datasets and self-constructed datasets demonstrate that our approach provides substantial improvements, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance in generating truly three-dimensional LiDAR-like point clouds via mmWave radar.