RadarFuseNet: Phase-Weighted Complex-Valued Cross-Attention Fusion for Radar Signal Classification
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar is a compact sensing technology that is particularly well suited for perception tasks in situations where vision-based sensors are limited, such as under adverse environmental conditions or occlusion. The complex-valued and nonlinear nature of mmWave radar IQ signals makes complex-valued deep learning a natural choice for extracting relevant information from in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data. However, progress in IQ-based deep learning is limited by the scarcity of annotated radar IQ datasets. In this paper, we propose RadarFuseNet, a bidirectional complex-valued cross-attention fusion network with phase-aware weighting inside the attention mechanism, combining IQ and FFT-derived features extracted by two complex-valued CNN feature extractors. To the best of our knowledge, RadarFuseNet is among the first complex-valued dual-domain fusion frameworks to employ phase-weighted bidirectional cross-attention for radar object classification. Evaluated on our own custom complex-valued IQ radar dataset of occluded objects, RadarFuseNet achieves classification accuracies of 97.70% at 64GHz center frequency and 94.70% at 67GHz center frequency, outperforming all comparison and ablation models.