ProbRadarM3F: mmWave Radar based Human Skeletal Pose Estimation with Probability Map Guided Multi-Format Feature Fusion

Millimeter wave (mmWave) radar is a non-intrusive privacy and relatively convenient and inexpensive device, which has been demonstrated to be applicable in place of RGB cameras in human indoor pose estimation tasks. However, mmWave radar relies on the collection of reflected signals from the target, and the radar signals containing information is difficult to be fully applied. This has been a long-standing hindrance to the improvement of pose estimation accuracy. To address this major challenge, this paper introduces a probability map guided multi-format feature fusion model, ProbRadarM3F. This is a novel radar feature extraction framework using a traditional FFT method in parallel with a probability map based positional encoding method. ProbRadarM3F fuses the traditional heatmap features and the positional features, then effectively achieves the estimation of 14 keypoints of the human body. Experimental evaluation on the HuPR dataset proves the effectiveness of the model proposed in this paper, outperforming other methods experimented on this dataset with an AP of 69.9 %. The emphasis of our study is focusing on the position information that is not exploited before in radar singal. This provides direction to investigate other potential non-redundant information from mmWave rader.