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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [FAST-LIO: A Fast, Robust LiDAR-inertial Odometry Package by Tightly-Coupled Iterated Kalman Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08196/) (2020)
- [Patchwork++: Fast and Robust Ground Segmentation Solving Partial Under-Segmentation Using 3D Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11919/) (2022)
- [See Through Smoke: Robust Indoor Mapping with Low-cost mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00398/) (2019)
- [High Resolution Point Clouds from mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09273/) (2022)
- [Towards Dense and Accurate Radar Perception Via Efficient Cross-Modal Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08460/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Based Point Cloud Super-Resolution for mmWave Radar Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06012/) (2024)
- [Achelous: A Fast Unified Water-surface Panoptic Perception Framework based on Fusion of Monocular Camera and 4D mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07102/) (2023)
- [4D iRIOM: 4D Imaging Radar Inertial Odometry and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13962/) (2023)
- [DREAM-PCD: Deep Reconstruction and Enhancement of mmWave Radar Pointcloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15374/) (2023)
- [DenserRadar: A 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud detector based on dense LiDAR point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05131/) (2024)
- [Enhancing mmWave Radar Point Cloud via Visual-inertial Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17229/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Unsupervised Radar Point Cloud Enhancement via Arbitrary LiDAR Guided Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09887/) (2025)
- [4D-RaDiff: Latent Point Diffusion for 4D Radar Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14235/) (2025)
- [DAP: Doppler-aware Point Network for Heterogeneous mmWave Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09604/) (2026)
- [Depth-Semantic Alignment and Affinity-Guided Fusion for Structured Radar Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26743/) (2026)
- [4D Radar Perception Algorithms for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19216/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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. Code will be released after publication.