Papers for

building safety teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Generative radar depth estimation works well through smoke and fog

GRADE: Single-Frame Generative Radar Depth Estimation Under Visual Degradation

Abstract: Dense 3D depth perception fails under smoke, fog, and darkness because optical sensors cannot penetrate airborne particulates. mmWave radar remains usable and measures range accurately under these conditions, but its small aperture limits angular resolution. We present GRADE, which grounds a pretrained generative prior in single-frame radar geometry to estimate high-fidelity metric depth. GRADE first maps raw 4D radar spectra to coarse metric depth. A latent diffusion backbone then recovers structural detail while conditioning every denoising step on this estimate. A pixel-space adapter uses residual camera cues when available and is trained across clear, smoke-degraded, and occluded inputs so the full output approaches the radar-conditioned path as visibility degrades. Trained and evaluated on ~95K frames across 12 buildings with real smoke, GRADE achieves an MAE of 0.303 m in clear scenes and 0.313 m under smoke, outperforming existing baselines. Code and datasets are available at https://phi-lab-rice.github.io/GRADE.

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Seeing through smoke, fog, or darkness is hard for regular cameras because light gets blocked or scattered. The authors show that radar, which uses radio waves, can measure distances well even in these conditions, but it usually captures coarse images. They developed GRADE, a method that uses a kind of smart image generation to turn low-resolution radar data into detailed 3D depth maps. This approach works well both in clear air and through real smoke, improving on other techniques.
Open 2609.10756v1