RISE: Single Static Radar-based Indoor Scene Understanding
This addresses the need for robust and privacy-preserving indoor scene understanding, which is a fundamental open problem, by providing a novel method that leverages multipath reflections for geometric reasoning.
The paper tackles the problem of indoor scene understanding using a single static millimeter-wave radar, which preserves privacy but has low spatial resolution, by introducing RISE, a benchmark and system that jointly performs layout reconstruction and object detection. It reduces Chamfer Distance by 60% to 16 cm compared to state-of-the-art in layout reconstruction and achieves 58% IoU for object detection.
Robust and privacy-preserving indoor scene understanding remains a fundamental open problem. While optical sensors such as RGB and LiDAR offer high spatial fidelity, they suffer from severe occlusions and introduce privacy risks in indoor environments. In contrast, millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar preserves privacy and penetrates obstacles, but its inherently low spatial resolution makes reliable geometric reasoning difficult. We introduce RISE, the first benchmark and system for single-static-radar indoor scene understanding, jointly targeting layout reconstruction and object detection. RISE is built upon the key insight that multipath reflections, traditionally treated as noise, encode rich geometric cues. To exploit this, we propose a Bi-Angular Multipath Enhancement that explicitly models Angle-of-Arrival and Angle-of-Departure to recover secondary (ghost) reflections and reveal invisible structures. On top of these enhanced observations, a simulation-to-reality Hierarchical Diffusion framework transforms fragmented radar responses into complete layout reconstruction and object detection. Our benchmark contains 50,000 frames collected across 100 real indoor trajectories, forming the first large-scale dataset dedicated to radar-based indoor scene understanding. Extensive experiments show that RISE reduces the Chamfer Distance by 60% (down to 16 cm) compared to the state of the art in layout reconstruction, and delivers the first mmWave-based object detection, achieving 58% IoU. These results establish RISE as a new foundation for geometry-aware and privacy-preserving indoor scene understanding using a single static radar.