Detection improvement of off-pin targets in FMCW radars

Abstract

Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars get target range and Doppler information by extracting the target beat frequency and phase exchange based on the well-known Two-Dimensional Fast Fourier Transform (2D-FFT) processing algorithm. Target whose beat frequency does not lie on the FFT grids suffers from great detection degradation. Doubling the number of FFT points, and consequently, the hardware processing complexity is a common solution to solve this problem. In this paper, a proposed method to increase the detection performance of these targets and avoid increasing system complexity is introduced. The proposed method depends on applying a proposed filter following the first and second FFT algorithms. The filter order and weights are chosen so that only one peak form the adjacent peaks of off-pin targets are distinguished. The superiority of the proposed method over the traditional one is validated for different scenarios through the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC).