JSTSP Volume 15 Issue 4

Automotive imaging radars require high angular resolution which can be achieved by a large antenna aperture. In order to obey Nyquist spatial sampling rate, a large number of array elements and receive channels is required. In practice, this solution results in a prohibitively high cost and complexity. 

We propose a high-resolution imaging radar system to enable high-fidelity four-dimensional (4D) sensing for autonomous driving, i.e., range, Doppler, azimuth, and elevation, through a joint sparsity design in frequency spectrum and array configurations. To accommodate a high number of automotive radars operating at the same frequency band while avoiding mutual interference, random sparse step-frequency waveform (RSSFW) is proposed to synthesize a large effective bandwidth to achieve high range resolution profiles.

Automotive radar is used in many applications of advanced driver assistance systems and is considered as one of the key technologies for highly automated driving. An overview of state-of-the-art signal processing in automotive radar is presented along with current research directions and practical challenges.