mmWave-Diffusion:A Novel Framework for Respiration Sensing Using Observation-Anchored Conditional Diffusion Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces mmWave-Diffusion, a novel diffusion-based framework for contactless respiration sensing using mmWave radar, effectively removing interference and improving respiratory monitoring accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes an observation-anchored conditional diffusion model and a specialized Radar Diffusion Transformer for enhanced respiratory signal reconstruction.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art waveform reconstruction.

Enables robust respiratory-rate estimation.

Operates effectively with only 20 reverse steps.

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables contactless respiratory sensing,yet fine-grained monitoring is often degraded by nonstationary interference from body micromotions.To achieve micromotion interference removal,we propose mmWave-Diffusion,an observation-anchored conditional diffusion framework that directly models the residual between radar phase observations and the respiratory ground truth,and initializes sampling within an observation-consistent neighborhood rather than from Gaussian noise-thereby aligning the generative process with the measurement physics and reducing inference overhead. The accompanying Radar Diffusion Transformer (RDT) is explicitly conditioned on phase observations, enforces strict one-to-one temporal alignment via patch-level dual positional encodings, and injects local physical priors through banded-mask multi-head cross-attention, enabling robust denoising and interference removal in just 20 reverse steps. Evaluated on 13.25 hours of synchronized radar-respiration data, mmWave-Diffusion achieves state-of-the-art waveform reconstruction and respiratory-rate estimation with strong generalization. Code repository:https://github.com/goodluckyongw/mmWave-Diffusion.