Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt: Close Proximity Geometry Reconstruction Using FMCW Radar Shadow Effects
Authors: Felix de Trogoff du Boisguezennec, Benjamin Ramtoula, Daniele De Martini
Organizations: Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
Reliable perception in adverse conditions remains challenging for autonomous systems, as cameras and LiDAR degrade in poor lighting or weather. Millimetre-wave FMCW radar is robust to such conditions, but its elevation collapse limits geometric reasoning. We observe that vehicle chassis occlude radar rays and form a distinctive geometric shadow, and its consistency can enable us to infer useful information about objects whose returns intersect this shadow. Motivated by this observation, we propose a method to recover the 3D, in-plane inclination of nearby slender vertical objects from this cue. The object inclination is retrieved without assumptions about the wider scene, but through an analytical, closed-form mapping between its radar return boundaries and the opening angle. Validation in simulation and experimentation on a Navtech CTS350-X radar shows that inclinations can be estimated under practical conditions, with segmentation of the object in the radar scan emerging as the main bottleneck. This work highlights chassis shadows as a novel geometric cue, extending the role of 2D rotating radar beyond localisation and toward 3D scene reconstruction.
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar perception is limited by data scarcity: models trained on existing radar datasets fail to generalize to new objects, environments, and sensing trajectories. We present RadarTwin, a framework for generating deployment-specific radar training data before real data collection. Given a 3D reconstruction of a target space (phone LiDAR, robot-mounted sensing, or RGB-to-3D), RadarTwin uses a vision-language model to infer radar-relevant surface materials and a physics-based ray tracer to synthesize raw frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar measurements with multi-bounce propagation. To study what transfers from simulation to reality, we collect a paired real-simulated dataset spanning household objects, material classes, distances, rotations, translations, and mobile sensing trajectories. We show that simulated and real radar share the same object-discriminative shape and material features, and that modeling the environment's multipath is essential to matching real measurements. A representation trained on simulation alone recognizes real objects at 2.5 times chance with no real radar labels, and a few labeled examples raise this to 95.3% on a 12-way recognition task. RadarTwin enables training radar perception for a new space before any real radar data is collected there.
Global localization with scanning millimeter-wave radar remains challenging because place-recognition descriptors often discard spatial structure needed for accurate pose retrieval. We present ReRadar, a radar global localization pipeline that extracts rotation-equivariant intermediate features using steerable convolutional neural networks, forms rotation-invariant descriptors through group pooling and NetVLAD aggregation, and combines descriptor retrieval with landmark-based matching to estimate the robot's three-degree-of-freedom (3-DoF) pose. Across fixed database-query evaluations, ReRadar with target-dataset adaptation achieves 99.37% Recall@1 on OORD Bellmouth, 91.44% Recall@1 with 80.99% F1_max on Mulran DCC01, and 99.38% Recall@1 on falling-snow Boreas sequence. Without target-dataset data, the cross-dataset model reaches 98.07% Recall@1 on OORD, performing comparably to the evaluated state-of-the-art methods.
Duc Manh Nguyen, Truong Giang Dao, Gia Nghiem Luong +2
Indoor mmWave radar perception is difficult to reproduce because measured range-angle responses depend on scene geometry, material response, multipath, hardware conventions, and signal processing. Existing ray-tracing and digital-twin tools often expose rendering, channel, or path-level quantities, while radar sensing requires complex signal products that can be processed and compared in the same domain as real FMCW measurements. We present mmRadarTwin, a signal-level and path-attributed digital-twin platform for indoor mmWave radar. mmRadarTwin links a real radar measurement branch with an Unreal Engine scene-simulation branch through a shared receive-channel and range-angle processing interface. The simulator writes complex multi-channel receive grids and exports per-path contribution records that identify the actor, material tag, propagation event, and output-bin support of each simulated return. We evaluate mmRadarTwin in an office deployment using a commodity monostatic mmWave radar and mobile scene-capture hardware. Across 154 measured poses spanning 22 radar locations, the current physics-only path-basis simulator recalls 70.8% of measurement-active geometry-supported response regions in the central usable field of view while exposing residuals caused by weak or missing path support, shifted responses, unsupported anchors, and missing physical mechanisms. Rather than claiming complete radar-map reconstruction or cross-room generalization, mmRadarTwin establishes a practical systems workflow for constructing, comparing, and diagnosing indoor radar digital twins.