SSMRadNet : A Sample-wise State-Space Framework for Efficient and Ultra-Light Radar Segmentation and Object Detection

We introduce SSMRadNet, the first multi-scale State Space Model (SSM) based detector for Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar that sequentially processes raw ADC samples through two SSMs. One SSM learns a chirp-wise feature by sequentially processing samples from all receiver channels within one chirp, and a second SSM learns a representation of a frame by sequentially processing chirp-wise features. The latent representations of a radar frame are decoded to perform segmentation and detection tasks. Comprehensive evaluations on the RADIal dataset show SSMRadNet has 10–33× fewer parameters and 60–88× less computation (GFLOPs) while being 3.7× faster than state-of-the-art transformer and convolution-based radar detectors at competitive performance for segmentation tasks.