New Approach Based on Pix2Pix-YOLOv7 mmWave Radar for Target Detection and Classification

Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is increasingly used for various detection and classification applications in different fields, such as autonomous vehicles and mining fields. Our objective is to increase the classification accuracy of objects detected using millimeter-wave radar. We have developed an approach based on millimeter-wave radar. The proposed solution combines the use of an FMCW radar, a YOLOv7 model, and the Pix2Pix architecture. The latter architecture was used to reduce noise in the heatmaps. We create a dataset of 4125 heatmaps annotated with five different object classes. To evaluate the proposed approach, 14 different models were trained using the annotated heatmap dataset. In the initial experiment, we compared the models using metrics such as mean average precision (mAP), precision, and recall. The results showed that the proposed model of YOLOv7 (YOLOv7-PM) was the most efficient in terms of mAP_0.5, which reached 90.1%, and achieved a mAP_0.5:0.95 of 49.51%. In the second experiment, we compared the models with a cleaned dataset generated using the Pix2Pix architecture. As a result, we observed improved performances, with the Pix2Pix + YOLOv7-PM model achieving the best mAP_0.5, reaching 91.82%, and a mAP_0.5:0.95 of 52.59%.