Privacy-Preserving Full-Body Meshing from mmWave Radar via Mesh Foundation Model Supervision

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-preserving human perception, but the extreme sparsity of point clouds from commercial single-chip sensors (mean ~6.5 points/frame; ~28% empty frames) has confined prior art to body-part keypoints or discrete action classification. We present a cross-modal teacher-student framework that lifts commercial radar to full-body, per-frame, metric 3D mesh reconstruction with per-joint uncertainty. Three innovations: (1) a mesh-foundation-model teacher - SAM 3D Body produces whole-body MHR ground truth (70 joints, 18,439 mesh vertices) from a single RGB frame with zero training, slashing annotation cost by orders of magnitude; (2) StudentPoseFormer - set encoding with masked attention pooling, a temporal Transformer, and a CVAE multi-hypothesis head that outputs both the pose mean and per-joint variance, honestly reporting where the radar cannot see; and (3) a multi-stage ground-truth quality pipeline (confidence gating, depth validation, temporal smoothing, bone-length consistency, bad-frame rejection) plus systematic information-lever ablations. On the public MM-Fi benchmark (same TI IWR6843 sensor, cross-subject), our full configuration reaches 7.45 cm 12-joint MPJPE, with ablations proving the causal value of point accumulation (k = 3, -0.34 cm), Doppler (-0.85 cm; -2 cm at the wrist on fast actions), and velocity loss (-0.27 cm). On our own synchronized radar + RGB-D corpus with block-level held-out splits, the pipeline achieves 21.47 cm end-to-end (per-joint hierarchy from 4.8 cm at the hip to 34.7 cm at the wrist - matching physical information limits), could be improved to 15 cm with ~30k diverse samples, and a scaling law shows sample diversity, not volume, is the binding constraint. Deployment inference is radar-only - no camera, no image.