Distributed ISAC-Enabled Multimodal Recovery of Missing 2-D LiDAR Measurements

Abstract

Recovering missing regions in 2-D LiDAR scans is crucial for maintaining geometric awareness in environmental sensing. LiDAR-only reconstruction relies on measurements surrounding the missing region and can degrade as the unobserved sector grows or the surface geometry becomes more complex. This paper presents a distributed integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework that uses directional 60-GHz beam-training measurements from multiple receivers to assist in the recovery of missing regions in 2-D LiDAR scans. Transmitter and receiver positions, beam directions, and relative beam-power thresholding are used to construct an RF-derived surface prior without requiring RF time-of-flight measurements. The resulting RF-derived range estimates are then fused with LiDAR measurements to estimate the missing geometry. The proposed framework is evaluated in an indoor environment using LiDAR and 60-GHz phased-array measurements from 55 receiver viewpoints comprising 37,620 beam-pair power measurements across 72 controlled missing-sector cases. The results show that RF-assisted reconstruction provides larger accuracy gains as the missing-sector width increases. For the 80-degree missing-sector case investigated in this paper, RF+polar fusion is shown to reduce the mean absolute error (MAE) from 2.271 m for polar LiDAR interpolation to 0.617 m, corresponding to a 72.8% reduction. The results further show that useful RF-assisted recovery can be maintained even with fewer beam-pair measurements under limited beam training. These findings demonstrate that directional communication measurements can support environmental sensing by providing complementary geometric information for missing LiDAR regions.