Real-time Radar Imaging with Time Domain Correlation and Doppler Beam Sharpening

Abstract

Imaging with radar serves numerous purposes across remote sensing, monitoring civil infrastructure, detecting passing vehicles, and recognizing vulnerable road users (VRUs) within Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). In most ADAS applications, one among a variety of radars, the millimeter wave (mmWave) radars, are limited to acquiring range, azimuth, elevation, and Doppler information. Configuration of the mm-wave radar in imaging form by fully utilizing built-in sending and receiving models is proposed in the work presented in this paper. The mm-wave radar is placed on a mobile platform, and the time domain correlation (TDC) is applied, followed by Doppler beam sharpening (DBS), to obtain radar imaging. The proposed algorithm was demonstrated with the help of IWR1642 radar, and real-time experiments were conducted with targets like cars, bicycles, and bikes. The mm-wave radar equipment and platform were moved with an approximate velocity and acquired I-Q channel data, further processed with the TDC-DBS algorithm. The experimental findings demonstrate successful target detection across scenarios considered in our work. Notably, the MIMO configuration on a fast-moving platform, along with the TDC-DBS algorithm, yielded superior results compared to the TDC algorithm. This algorithm stands out as a promising choice for automotive industry applications, such as imaging guardrails, detecting passing vehicles, and identifying vulnerable road users using side-mounted radar configurations. © 2024 IEEE.