# RIME-Net: A Physics-Guided Unpaired Learning Framework for Automotive Radar Interference Mitigation and Weak Target Enhancement

**Authors:** Jiajia Shi, Haojie Zhou, Liu Chu, Fengling Tan, Guocheng Sun, Yu Tao

PMC · DOI: 10.3390/s26041277 · 2026-02-15

## TL;DR

RIME-Net is a new deep learning framework that improves radar performance by reducing interference and enhancing weak targets without needing paired training data.

## Contribution

The paper introduces RIME-Net, a physics-guided unpaired learning framework for joint interference mitigation and weak target enhancement in automotive radar.

## Key findings

- RIME-Net outperforms existing methods in SINR, recall, and structural similarity.
- The framework effectively suppresses interference while preserving signal integrity.
- Experiments show robust performance across diverse datasets and environments.

## Abstract

With the widespread deployment of automotive millimeter-wave radars, mutual interference and broadband noise severely degrade the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of range–Doppler (RD) maps, leading to the loss of weak targets. Existing deep learning methods rely on difficult-to-obtain paired training samples and often cause excessive target smoothing due to a lack of physical constraints. To address these challenges, this paper proposes RIME-Net, a physics-guided unpaired learning framework designed to jointly achieve radar interference mitigation and weak target enhancement. First, based on a cycle-consistent adversarial architecture, we designed the Interference Mitigation Network (IM-Net). IM-Net integrates spectral consistency loss and identity mapping constraints, learning a robust mapping from the interference domain to the clean domain without paired supervision, effectively suppressing low-rank interference and preserving signal integrity. Second, to recover target details attenuated during denoising, we propose the saliency-aware Target Enhancement Network (TE-Net). TE-Net combines multi-scale residual blocks and channel-spatial attention mechanisms, selectively enhancing weak target features based on saliency priors. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets show that RIME-Net significantly outperforms existing supervised and model-driven methods in terms of SINR, recall, and structural similarity, providing a robust solution for reliable radar perception in complex electromagnetic environments.

## Full-text entities

- **Diseases:** RD (MESH:D006316), injury to (MESH:D014947)
- **Chemicals:** TPS (MESH:C089984), TE (MESH:D013691), IM-Net (-)
- **Species:** Homo sapiens (human, species) [taxon 9606]

## Figures

13 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12944260/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12944260