FreqPKC: Frequency-Aware PeakConv for Radar Semantic Segmentation

Overview & Synopsis

Automotive millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has attracted increasing attention for semantic segmentation in autonomous driving, owing to its robustness under adverse weather and lighting conditions. Recent works have introduced radar-specific neural operators such as PeakConv (PKC), inspired by constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection, to better model the peak-dominated characteristics of radar images. However, existing methods typically treat the guard bandwidth as learnable parameters, without explicitly characterizing the frequency response of the PKC operator. In this work, we revisit PKC from a frequency-domain perspective and propose Frequency-Aware PeakConv (FreqPKC), which explicitly models and exploits its underlying spectral characteristics. By analyzing the frequency response of PKC, FreqPKC enables the network to capture a broader range of frequency components and adaptively adjust its effective bandwidth. With the proposed Frequency-Aware (FA) module, the network can infer appropriate guard bandwidths to balance high- and low-frequency information: it enhances high-frequency components in target regions for more precise segmentation while suppressing noise through low-frequency filtering in background areas. Building on FreqPKC, we further develop FreqPKC-Net, a radar semantic segmentation (RSS) framework that integrates frequency-guided adaptive modulation with cross-view fusion for multi-view inputs, and can also be adapted to single-view data. Experiments on the public datasets CARRADA, CARRADA-RAC, and a self-built dataset named RS-SAR demonstrate that FreqPKC-Net consistently outperforms existing SoTA methods on both range-Doppler and range-angle views.