Real Aperture and Synthetic Aperture Joint Imaging Approach for Vehicle-mounted Forward Look Radar

Abstract

The vehicle-mounted millimeter-wave forward-looking imaging is a research hotspot in the radar field recently. If imaging is done only through the real aperture, the azimuth resolution of the radar will be still greatly restricted for the limitation of the aperture size. Considering the movement of the car itself, the synthetic aperture principle can be used to improve the azimuth resolution. However, synthetic aperture radar cannot completely solve the problem due to the blind area and left-right blurring of forward-looking area imaging (a small angular range directly in front). To this end, a new real aperture synthetic aperture joint imaging method is proposed, in which the real aperture can solve the problem of radar left and right blur, and can image at the forward-looking area. For the squint area, the length of the synthetic aperture is often longer than the real aperture, so higher resolution can be obtained by using synthetic aperture processing. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the correctness of the back projection algorithm used in this vehicle-mounted forward look radar.