Geology

MIMO

Mathematics

Beamforming

Continuous-wave radar

Radar imaging

Bistatic radar

Inverse synthetic aperture radar

Radar engineering details

Azimuth

Radar lock-on

Geometry

Computer science

Side looking airborne radar

Synthetic aperture radar

Computer vision

Radar

Remote sensing

Telecommunications

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

Millimeter-wave radars are being increasingly integrated into commercial vehicles to support advanced driver-assistance system features. A key shortcoming for present-day vehicular radar imaging is poor azimuth resolution (for side-looking operation) due to the form factor limits on antenna size and placement. In this paper, we propose a solution via a new multiple-input and multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) imaging technique, that applies coherent SAR principles to vehicular MIMO radar to improve the side-view (angular) resolution. The proposed 2-stage hierarchical MIMO-SAR processing workflow drastically reduces the computation load while preserving image resolution. To enable coherent processing over the synthetic aperture, we integrate a radar odometry algorithm that estimates the trajectory of ego-radar. The MIMO-SAR algorithm is validated by both simulations and real experiment data collected by a vehicle-mounted radar platform.

MIMO-SAR: A Hierarchical High-Resolution Imaging Algorithm for mmWave FMCW Radar in Autonomous Driving