2021/06/15 by Akarsh Prabhakara, Prabhakara, Akarsh, Diana Zhang +8
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Optical Sensing Technologies #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies #Microwave Imaging and Scattering Analysis #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Robotics (cs.RO) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.07856
openalex publication_date 2021/06/15 · openalex created_date 2021/06/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
mmWave radars offer excellent depth resolution even at very long ranges owing to their high bandwidth. But their angular resolution is at least an order-of-magnitude worse than camera and lidar systems. Hence, mmWave radar is not a capable 3-D imaging solution in isolation. We propose Metamoran, a system that combines the complimentary strengths of radar and camera to obtain accurate, high resolution depth images over long ranges even in high clutter environments, all from a single fixed vantage point. Metamoran enables rich long-range depth imaging with applications in security and surveillance, roadside safety infrastructure and wide-area mapping. Our approach leverages the high angular resolution from cameras using computer vision techniques, including image segmentation and monocular depth estimation, to obtain object shape. Our core contribution is a method to convert this object shape into an RF I/Q equivalent, which we use in a novel radar processing pipeline to help declutter the scene and capture extremely weak reflections from objects at long distances. We perform a detailed evaluation of Metamoran's depth imaging capabilities in 400 diverse scenes. Our evaluation shows that Metamoran estimates the depth of static objects up to 90 m and moving objects up to 305 m and with a median error of 28 cm, an improvement of 13× compared to a naive radar+camera baseline and 23× compared to monocular depth estimation.