DART: Implicit Doppler Tomography for Radar Novel View Synthesis
This addresses the problem of rapid prototyping for radio-frequency system designers by enabling more realistic radar simulation, though it is incremental as it adapts existing neural rendering techniques to radar.
The paper tackled the challenge of simulating realistic radar scans by proposing DART, a Neural Radiance Field-inspired method that uses radar-specific physics for rendering range-Doppler images, resulting in superior synthesis from novel views compared to state-of-the-art baselines across all datasets.
Simulation is an invaluable tool for radio-frequency system designers that enables rapid prototyping of various algorithms for imaging, target detection, classification, and tracking. However, simulating realistic radar scans is a challenging task that requires an accurate model of the scene, radio frequency material properties, and a corresponding radar synthesis function. Rather than specifying these models explicitly, we propose DART - Doppler Aided Radar Tomography, a Neural Radiance Field-inspired method which uses radar-specific physics to create a reflectance and transmittance-based rendering pipeline for range-Doppler images. We then evaluate DART by constructing a custom data collection platform and collecting a novel radar dataset together with accurate position and instantaneous velocity measurements from lidar-based localization. In comparison to state-of-the-art baselines, DART synthesizes superior radar range-Doppler images from novel views across all datasets and additionally can be used to generate high quality tomographic images.