RadarDINO: Distilling a Visual Foundation Model into mmWave Radar for Human Mesh Reconstruction

Furkan Mert Algan, Zhifan Ni, Eckehard Steinbach

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar offers a privacy-preserving and illumination-robust alternative for human mesh reconstruction (HMR). However, high-fidelity radar HMR remains challenging. Sparse point cloud-based methods suffer from information loss and missed detections, while raw radar tensor methods like RT-Mesh lack fine-grained semantics and explicit local body modeling. In this paper, we propose RadarDINO, a radar HMR framework that distills visual semantics from a DINOv3 teacher into 3D radar representations and introduces explicit geometric supervision. DINOv3 descriptors are transferred to radar voxels via calibrated RGB-radar geometry, providing voxel- and body-part-level supervision for part-aware radar representations. We further incorporate vertex- and joint-losses to directly constrain reconstructed geometry. On the M4Human dataset, our method outperforms the SOTA baseline across all three evaluation splits.