We consider the problem of range-Doppler imaging using one-bit automotive LFMCW1 or PMCW radar that utilizes one-bit ADC sampling with time-varying thresholds at the receiver. The one-bit sampling technique can significantly reduce the cost as well as the power consumption of automotive radar systems. We formulate the one-bit LFMCW/PMCW radar rangeDoppler imaging problem as one-bit sparse parameter estimation. The recently proposed hyperparameter-free (and hence user friendly) weighted SPICE algorithms, including SPICE, LIKES, SLIM and IAA, achieve excellent parameter estimation performance for data sampled with high precision. However, these algorithms cannot be used directly for one-bit data. In this paper we first present a regularized minimization algorithm, referred to as 1bSLIM, for accurate range-Doppler imaging using onebit radar systems. Then, we describe how to extend the SPICE, LIKES and IAA algorithms to the one-bit data case, and refer to these extensions as 1bSPICE, 1bLIKES and 1bIAA. These onebit hyperparameter-free algorithms are unified within the one-bit weighted SPICE framework. Moreover, efficient implementations of the aforementioned algorithms are investigated that rely heavily on the use of FFTs. Finally, both simulated and experimental examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for range-Doppler imaging using one-bit automotive radar systems.
Simulation of radar cross-sections (RCS) of pedestrians at automotive radar frequencies forms a key tool for software verification test beds for advanced driver assistance systems. Two commonly used simulation methods are: the computationally simple scattering center model of dynamic humans; and the shooting and bouncing ray technique based on geometric optics. The latter technique is more accurate but due to its computational complexity, it is usually used only for modeling scattered returns of still human poses. In this work, we combine the two methods in a linear regression framework to acc…
Nowadays, mutual interference among automotive radars has become a problem of wide concern. In this paper, a decentralized spectrum allocation approach is presented to avoid mutual interference among automotive radars. Although decentralized spectrum allocation has been extensively studied in cognitive radio sensor networks, two challenges are observed for automotive sensors using radar. First, the allocation approach should be dynamic as all radars are mounted on moving vehicles. Second, each radar does not communicate with the others so it has quite limited information. A machine learning te…
We present a framework for simulating realistic inverse synthetic aperture radar images of automotive targets at millimeter wave frequencies. The model incorporates radar scattering phenomenology of commonly found vehicles along with range-Doppler based clutter and receiver noise. These images provide insights into the physical dimensions of the target, the number of wheels and the trajectory undertaken by the target. The model is experimentally validated with measurement data gathered from an automotive radar. The images from the simulation database are subsequently classified using both trad…
We present an ultra-short range IEEE 802.11ad-based automotive joint radar-communications (JRC) framework, wherein we improve the radar's Doppler resilience by incorporating Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequences in the preamble. The proposed processing reveals detailed micro-features of common automotive objects verified through extended scattering center models of animated pedestrian, bicycle, and car targets. Numerical experiments demonstrate $2.5$% reduction in the probability-of-false-alarm at low signal-to-noise-ratios and improvement in the peak-to-sidelobe level dynamic range up to Doppler veloc…
Mutual interference in automotive radar scenarios is going to become a major concern as the density of vehicles with radar sensors in the roads increases. The present work tackles the problem of frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) to FMCW and continuous wave interference. In this context, we propose a signal processing technique to blindly identify and remove interference by using the fast Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm to project the interference signals in a reduced chirplet basis, and separate it from the target signal with minimal loss of information. Significant reduct…
Automotive radars at the Terahertz (THz) frequency band have the potential to be compact and lightweight while providing high (nearly-optical) angular resolution. In this paper, we propose a bistatic THz automotive radar that employs the recently proposed orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) multi-carrier waveform. As a stand-alone communications waveform, OCDM has been investigated for robustness against interference in time-frequency selective channels. The THz-band path loss, and, hence, radar signal bandwidth, are range-dependent. We address this unique feature through a multi-car…
Due to the rapid increase in 76 GHz automotive spectrum use in recent years, wireless interference is becoming a legitimate area of concern. However, the recent rise in interest of automated vehicles (AVs) has also spurred new growth and adoption of low frequency vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications in and around the 5.8 GHz unlicensed bands, opening the possibility for communications spectrum reuse in the form of joint radar-communications (JRC). In this work, we present a low frequency 5.9 GHz side-looking polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for automotive use, utilizing a rang…
Conventional sensing applications rely on electromagnetic far-field channel models with plane wave propagation. However, recent ultra-short-range automotive radar applications at upper millimeter-wave or low terahertz (THz) frequencies envisage operation in the near-field region, where the wavefront is spherical. Unlike far-field, the near-field beampattern is dependent on both range and angle, thus requiring a different approach to waveform design. For the first time in the literature, we adopt the beampattern matching approach to design unimodular waveforms for THz automotive radars with low…
Automotive targets undergoing turns in road junctions offer large synthetic apertures over short dwell times to automotive radars that can be exploited for obtaining fine cross-range resolution. Likewise, the wide bandwidths of the automotive radar signal yield high-range resolution profiles. Together, they are exploited for generating inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images that offer rich information regarding the target vehicle's size, shape, and trajectory which is useful for object recognition and classification. However, a key requirement for ISAR is translation motion compensatio…
The interest of the automotive industry has progressively focused on subjects related to driver assistance systems as well as autonomous cars. Cars combine a variety of sensors to perceive their surroundings robustly. Among them, radar sensors are indispensable because of their independence of lighting conditions and the possibility to directly measure velocity. However, radar interference is an issue that becomes prevalent with the increasing amount of radar systems in automotive scenarios. In this paper, we address this issue for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars with fully c…
This paper focuses on the gridless direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation for data acquired by non-uniform linear arrays (NLAs) in automotive applications. Atomic norm minimization (ANM) is a promising gridless sparse recovery algorithm under the Toeplitz model and solved by convex relaxation, thus it is only applicable to uniform linear arrays (ULAs) with array manifolds having a Vandermonde structure. In automotive applications, it is essential to apply the gridless DoA estimation to NLAs with arbitrary geometry with efficiency. In this paper, a fast ANM-based gridless DoA estimation algorith…
In automotive systems, a radar is a key component of autonomous driving. Using transmit and reflected radar signal by a target, we can capture the target range and velocity. However, when interference signals exist, noise floor increases and it severely affects the detectability of target objects. For these reasons, previous studies have been proposed to cancel interference or reconstruct original signals. However, the conventional signal processing methods for canceling the interference or reconstructing the transmit signals are difficult tasks, and also have many restrictions. In this work, …
Automotive radar is a key component in an ADAS. The increasing number of radars implemented in vehicles makes interference between them a noteworthy issue. One method of interference mitigation is to limit the TBP of radar waveforms. However, the problems of how much TBP is necessary and how to optimally utilize the limited TBP have not been addressed. We take CWS as an example and propose a method of designing the radar waveform parameters oriented by the performance of CWS We propose a metric to quantify the CWS performance and study how the radar waveform parameters (bandwidth and duration)…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radars are being increasingly integrated in commercial vehicles to support new Adaptive Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS) features that require accurate location and Doppler velocity estimates of objects, independent of environmental conditions. To explore radar-based ADAS applications, we have updated our test-bed with Texas Instrument's 4-chip cascaded FMCW radar (TIDEP-01012) that forms a non-uniform 2D MIMO virtual array. In this paper, we develop the necessary received signal models for applying different direction of arrival (DoA) estimation algorithms and experimen…
The time division multiple access (TDMA) technique has been applied in automotive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. However, it suffers from the transmit energy loss, and as a result the parameter estimation performance degradation when the number of transmit elements increases. To tackle these problem, a transmit beamspace (TB) Doppler division multiple access (DDMA) approach is proposed. First, a phase modulation matrix with empty Doppler spectrum is introduced. By exploiting the empty Doppler spectrum, a test function based on sequential detection is developed to mitigate the Dop…
We propose a design strategy for optimizing antenna positions in linear arrays for far-field Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation of narrow-band sources in collocated MIMO radar. Our methodology allows to consider any spatial constraints and number of antennas, using as optimization function the Weiss- Weinstein bound formulated for an observation model with random target phase and known SNR, over a pre-determined Field-of-View (FoV). Optimized arrays are calculated for the typical case of a 77GHz MIMO radar of 3Tx and 4Rx channels. Simulations demonstrate a performance improvement of the pro…
The concept of cognitive radar (CR) enables radar systems to achieve intelligent adaption to a changeable environment with feedback facility from receiver to transmitter. However, the implementation of CR in a fast-changing environment usually requires a well-known environmental model. In our work, we stress the learning ability of CR in an unknown environment using a combination of CR and reinforcement learning (RL), called RL-CR. Less or no model of the environment is required. We also apply the general RL-CR to a specific problem of automotive radar spectrum allocation to mitigate mutual in…
The mutual interference between similar radar systems can result in reduced radar sensitivity and increased false alarm rates. To address the synchronous and asynchronous interference mitigation problems in similar radar systems, we first propose herein two slow-time coding schemes to modulate the pulses within a coherent processing interval (CPI) for a single-input-single-output (SISO) scenario. Specifically, the first coding scheme relies on Doppler shifting and the second one is devised based on an optimization approach. We further extend our discussion to the more general case of multiple-…
In this paper, constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector-based approaches are proposed for interference mitigation of Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars. The proposed methods exploit the fact that after dechirping and low-pass filtering operations the targets' beat signals of FMCW radars are composed of exponential sinusoidal components while interferences exhibit short chirp waves within a sweep. The spectra of interferences in the time-frequency ($t$-$f$) domain are detected by employing a 1-D CFAR detector along each frequency bin and then the detected map is dilated as a mas…
In recent years, Bayes filter methods in the labeled random finite set formulation have become increasingly powerful in the multi-target tracking domain. One of the latest outcomes is the Generalized Labeled Multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) filter which allows for stable cardinality and target state estimation as well as target identification in a unified framework. In contrast to the initial context of the GLMB filter, this paper makes use of it in the Track-Before-Detect (TBD) scheme and thus, avoids information loss due to thresholding and other data preprocessing steps. This paper provides a TBD GLM…
To accurately estimate locations and velocities of surrounding targets (cars) is crucial for advanced driver assistance systems based on radar sensors. In this paper we derive methods for fusing data from multiple radar sensors in order to improve the accuracy and robustness of such estimates. First we pose the target estimation problem as a multivariate multidimensional spectral estimation problem. The problem is multivariate since each radar sensor gives rise to a measurement channel. Then we investigate how the use of the cross-spectra affects target estimates. We see that the use of the ma…
Radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation and radar echo recovery are critically important for the proper functioning of ultra-wideband (UWB) radar systems using one-bit sampling techniques. We recently introduced a technique for one-bit UWB radar, which first uses a majorization-minimization method for RFI parameter estimation followed by a sparse method for radar echo recovery. However, this technique suffers from high computational complexity due to the need to estimate the parameters of each RFI source separately and iteratively. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient jo…
This paper presents a set of novel scan-matching techniques for vehicle pose estimation using automotive radar measurements. The proposed approach modifies the Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) -- a state-of-the-art scan-matching SLAM technique, widely used in lidar-based localization -- to account for particular aspects of radar environment perception. First, the polar NDT (PNDT) is introduced by solving the NDT problem in the polar coordinate system, natural for radar measurements. A better agreement between the measurement uncertainties and their representation in the scan-matching algor…
Automotive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are rapidly emerging as a candidate technological solution to enable a high-resolution environment mapping for autonomous driving. Compared to lidars and cameras, automotive-legacy radars can work in any weather condition and without an external source of illumination, but are limited in either range or angular resolution. SARs offer a relevant increase in angular resolution, provided that the ego-motion of the radar platform is known along the synthetic aperture. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental campaign aimed at assess…
Interference among frequency modulated continues wave automotive radars can either increase the noise floor, which occurs in the most cases, or generate a ghost target in rare situations. To address the increment of noise floor due to interference, we proposed a low calculation cost method using adaptive noise canceller to increase the signal-to-interference ratio. In a quadrature receiver, the interference in the positive half of frequency spectrum is correlated to that in the negative half of frequency spectrum, whereas the beat frequencies from real targets are always present in the positiv…
Millimeter-wave (mmW) radar is widely applied to advanced autopilot assistance systems. However, its small antenna aperture causes a low imaging resolution. In this paper, a new distributed mmW radar system is designed to solve this problem. It forms a large sparse virtual planar array to enlarge the aperture, using multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) processing. However, in this system, traditional imaging methods cannot apply to the sparse array. Therefore, we also propose a 3D super-resolution imaging method specifically for this system in this paper. The proposed method consists of t…
Autonomous radar has been an integral part of advanced driver assistance systems due to its robustness to adverse weather and various lighting conditions. Conventional automotive radars use digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms to process raw data into sparse radar pins that do not provide information regarding the size and orientation of the objects. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based algorithm for radar object detection. The algorithm takes in radar data in its raw tensor representation and places probabilistic oriented bounding boxes around the detected objects in bird's-e…
In the automotive sector, both radars and wireless communication are susceptible to interference. However, combining the radar and communication systems, i.e., radio frequency (RF) communications and sensing convergence, has the potential to mitigate interference in both systems. This article analyses the mutual interference of spectrally coexistent frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar and communication systems in terms of occurrence probability and impact, and introduces RadChat, a distributed networking protocol for mitigation of interference among FMCW based automotive radars, i…
This paper describes important considerations and challenges associated with online reinforcement-learning based waveform selection for target identification in frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) automotive radar systems. We present a novel learning approach based on satisficing Thompson sampling, which quickly identifies a waveform expected to yield satisfactory classification performance. We demonstrate through measurement-level simulations that effective waveform selection strategies can be quickly learned, even in cases where the radar must select from a large catalog of candidate …
In this paper, multiple metrics are presented in order to jointly evaluate the performance of the radar and communication functions in scenarios involving Dual Function Radar Communication (DFRC) systems using stochastic geometry. These metrics are applied in an automotive scenario involving a two-lane road with vehicles and smart traffic lights, both equipped with DFRC systems. First, the performance achieved with these metrics are validated using Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations. Additionally, optimisation w.r.t. the power of the vehicles and smart traffic lights is performed based on the metric…
Displaced automotive sensor imaging exploits joint processing of the data acquired from multiple radar units, each of which may have limited individual resources, to enhance the localization accuracy. Prior works either consider perfect synchronization among the sensors, employ single antenna radars, entail high processing cost, or lack performance analyses. Contrary to these works, we develop a displaced multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar signal model under coarse synchronization with only frame-level alignment. We derive Bayesian performanc…
A method is developed for sequential azimuth and height estimation of small objects at far distances in front of a moving vehicle using coherent or mutually incoherent MIMO arrays. The model considers phases and amplitudes for near-field multipath signals produced by specular non-diffusive ground-reflections where the reflection phase shift and power attenuation due to the interaction with the ground is assumed unknown. Group-sparsity allows combining measurements along the trajectory of the vehicle provided that the road is flat as well as measurements from multiple incoherent sensors at diff…
Automotive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can achieve a significant angular resolution enhancement for detecting static objects, which is essential for automated driving. Obtaining high resolution SAR images requires precise ego vehicle velocity estimation. A small velocity estimation error can result in a focused SAR image with objects at offset angles. In this paper, we consider an automotive SAR system that produces SAR images of static objects based on ego vehicle velocity estimation from the radar return signal without the overhead in complexity and cost of using an auxiliary global navig…
With the advent of self-driving vehicles, autonomous driving systems will have to rely on a vast number of heterogeneous sensors to perform dynamic perception of the surrounding environment. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems increase the resolution of conventional mass-market radars by exploiting the vehicle's ego-motion, requiring a very accurate knowledge of the trajectory, usually not compatible with automotive-grade navigation systems. In this regard, this paper deals with the analysis, estimation and compensation of trajectory estimation errors in automotive SAR systems, proposing a …
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）
Radar sensors are gradually becoming a wide-spread equipment for road vehicles, playing a crucial role in autonomous driving and road safety. The broad adoption of radar sensors increases the chance of interference among sensors from different vehicles, generating corrupted range profiles and range-Doppler maps. In order to extract distance and velocity of multiple targets from range-Doppler maps, the interference affecting each range profile needs to be mitigated. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional neural network for automotive radar interference mitigation. In order to train our…
