Revisiting Radar Perception With Spectral Point Clouds

Radar perception models are trained with different inputs, from range-Doppler spectra to sparse point clouds. Dense spectra are assumed to outperform sparse point clouds, yet they can vary considerably across sensors and configurations, which hinders transfer. In this paper, we provide alternatives for incorporating spectral information into radar point clouds and show that, point clouds need not underperform compared to spectra. We introduce the spectral point cloud paradigm, where point clouds are treated as sparse, compressed representations of the radar spectra, and argue that, when enriched with spectral information, they serve as strong candidates for a unified input representation that is more robust against sensor-specific differences. We develop an experimental framework that compares spectral point cloud (PC) models at varying densities against a dense range-Doppler (RD) benchmark, and report the density levels where the PC configurations meet the performance of the RD benchmark. Furthermore, we experiment with two basic spectral enrichment approaches, that inject additional target-relevant information into the point clouds. Contrary to the common belief that the dense RD approach is superior, we show that point clouds can do just as well, and can surpass the RD benchmark when enrichment is applied. Spectral point clouds can therefore serve as strong candidates for unified radar perception, paving the way for future radar foundation models.

Physics-informed Neural Networks for Encoding Dynamics in Real Physical Systems

This dissertation investigates physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) as candidate models for encoding governing equations, and assesses their performance on experimental data from two different systems. The first system is a simple nonlinear pendulum, and the second is 2D heat diffusion across the surface of a metal block. We show that for the pendulum system the PINNs outperformed equivalent uninformed neural networks (NNs) in the ideal data case, with accuracy improvements of 18x and 6x for 10 linearly-spaced and 10 uniformly-distributed random training points respectively. In similar test cases with real data collected from an experiment, PINNs outperformed NNs with 9.3x and 9.1x accuracy improvements for 67 linearly-spaced and uniformly-distributed random points respectively. For the 2D heat diffusion, we show that both PINNs and NNs do not fare very well in reconstructing the heating regime due to difficulties in optimizing the network parameters over a large domain in both time and space. We highlight that data denoising and smoothing, reducing the size of the optimization problem, and using LBFGS as the optimizer are all ways to improve the accuracy of the predicted solution for both PINNs and NNs. Additionally, we address the viability of deploying physics-informed models within physical systems, and we choose FPGAs as the compute substrate for deployment. In light of this, we perform our experiments using a PYNQ-Z1 FPGA and identify issues related to time-coherent sensing and spatial data alignment. We discuss the insights gained from this work and list future work items based on the proposed architecture for the system that our methods work to develop.