Learning 3D Occupancy from Beam Overlap in 2D Rotating mmWave Radar

Abstract

Robust 3D perception under adverse weather is critical for autonomous systems. While mmWave Radars are inherently weather-resistant, conventional 2D rotating Radar sensors lack direct elevation resolution, limiting their 3D perception ability. Although 4D imaging radars can provide elevation information, they typically suffer from limited coverage and range. In this work, we exploit a key observation about mechanically rotating 2D mmWave Radars: in each sweep, an overlap exists between adjacent azimuth beam coverage due to the width of the main lobe, which makes the reflected intensity difference imply object materials and geometric shapes, including elevation. With this observation, we propose a method that learns 3D occupancy by disentangling bird’s-eye view (BEV) layout and elevation estimation from one frame Radar scan. Specifically, we partition one sweep into two interleaved subsets, corresponding to overlapping beam directions, and utilize them to infer coarse geometric structure through spatial differences and intensity patterns. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing baselines. The codes will be publicly available.