mmYodar: Lightweight and Robust Object Detection using mmWave Signals

The detection of human objects can be crucial for various real-world applications, such as surveillance and autonomous driving. However, traditional vision-based approaches suffer from limitations such as low lighting conditions, occlusions, and privacy concerns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel automatic object detection system, called mmYodar, which utilizes millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar signals. Our system collects mmWave signals and calculates a 3D point cloud, which is transformed into a radar image for easier visualization and analysis. To improve the system's human profiling capability, we expand the corresponding points in the image with color based on the radar angle resolution. Then, a designed deep mutual learning framework is employed to detect human objects from the expanded image. Experimental results show that mmYodar achieves nearly real-time detection with an average precision of 90.35% in various scenarios, including indoor and outdoor environments, various lighting conditions, and in the presence of occlusions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of using mmWave radar signals for reliable and accurate human object detection. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/brave20005/mmYodar.