# mm-Pose: Real-Time Human Skeletal Posture Estimation using mmWave Radars and CNNs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [MM-Fi: Multi-Modal Non-Intrusive 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Wireless Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10345/) (2023)
- [mRI: Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation Dataset using mmWave, RGB-D, and Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08394/) (2022)
- [Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation via Motion-Decoupled Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01862/) (2024)
- [mmBody Benchmark: 3D Body Reconstruction Dataset and Analysis for Millimeter Wave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05070/) (2022)
- [HuPR: A Benchmark for Human Pose Estimation Using Millimeter Wave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12564/) (2022)
- [RT-Pose: A 4D Radar Tensor-based 3D Human Pose Estimation and Localization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13930/) (2024)
- [mmPose-NLP: A Natural Language Processing Approach to Precise Skeletal Pose Estimation using mmWave Radars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10327/) (2021)
- [MMVR: Millimeter-wave Multi-View Radar Dataset and Benchmark for Indoor Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10708/) (2024)
- [A Review of Indoor Millimeter Wave Device-based Localization and Device-free Sensing Technologies and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05593/) (2021)
- [MMBaT: A Multi-task Framework for mmWave-based Human Body Reconstruction and Translation Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10346/) (2023)
- [M4Human: A Large-Scale Multimodal mmWave Radar Benchmark for Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12378/) (2025)
- [Enhanced Human-Robot Collaboration using Constrained Probabilistic Human-Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03314/) (2023)
- [RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10293/) (2024)
- [Co-Speech Gesture Detection through Multi-Phase Sequence Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10680/) (2023)
- [ProbRadarM3F: mmWave Radar based Human Skeletal Pose Estimation with Probability Map Guided Multi-Format Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05164/) (2024)
- [SUPER: Seated Upper Body Pose Estimation using mmWave Radars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02455/) (2024)
- [mmDEAR: mmWave Point Cloud Density Enhancement for Accurate Human Body Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02375/) (2025)
- [RFGAN: RF-Based Human Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03727/) (2021)
- [Human Modelling and Pose Estimation Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19290/) (2024)
- [Learning Co-Speech Gesture Representations in Dialogue through Contrastive Learning: An Intrinsic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10535/) (2024)
- [SmartPoser: Arm Pose Estimation with a Smartphone and Smartwatch Using UWB and IMU Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03451/) (2025)
- [RFPose-OT: RF-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation via Optimal Transport Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13013/) (2022)
- [Non-contact Multimodal Indoor Human Monitoring Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07601/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Speech for Gesture Detection in Multimodal Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14952/) (2024)
- [Towards Multi-Modal Animal Pose Estimation: A Survey and In-Depth Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09312/) (2024)
- [I see what you mean: Co-Speech Gestures for Reference Resolution in Multimodal Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00071/) (2025)
- [SVAD: From Single Image to 3D Avatar via Synthetic Data Generation with Video Diffusion and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05475/) (2025)
- [RAPTR: Radar-based 3D Pose Estimation using Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08387/) (2025)
- [milliMamba: Specular-Aware Human Pose Estimation via Dual mmWave Radar with Multi-Frame Mamba Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20128/) (2025)
- [What Matters When Cotraining Robot Manipulation Policies on Everyday Human Videos?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, mm-Pose, a novel approach to detect and track human skeletons in real-time using an mmWave radar, is proposed. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first method to detect >15 distinct skeletal joints using mmWave radar reflection signals. The proposed method would find several applications in traffic monitoring systems, autonomous vehicles, patient monitoring systems and defense forces to detect and track human skeleton for effective and preventive decision making in real-time. The use of radar makes the system operationally robust to scene lighting and adverse weather conditions. The reflected radar point cloud in range, azimuth and elevation are first resolved and projected in Range-Azimuth and Range-Elevation planes. A novel low-size high-resolution radar-to-image representation is also presented, that overcomes the sparsity in traditional point cloud data and offers significant reduction in the subsequent machine learning architecture. The RGB channels were assigned with the normalized values of range, elevation/azimuth and the power level of the reflection signals for each of the points. A forked CNN architecture was used to predict the real-world position of the skeletal joints in 3-D space, using the radar-to-image representation. The proposed method was tested for a single human scenario for four primary motions, (i) Walking, (ii) Swinging left arm, (iii) Swinging right arm, and (iv) Swinging both arms to validate accurate predictions for motion in range, azimuth and elevation. The detailed methodology, implementation, challenges, and validation results are presented.