Enhanced Iron-Tunnel Recognition for Automotive Radars

In this paper, we propose a novel iron-tunnel recognition method to overcome the deterioration of the target or vehicle detection performance due to iron-tunnel clutters. Although a few studies on the reflection and diffraction on road surfaces have been conducted for automotive radar sensors, most of these studies did not consider the situation in which structures with larger reflection, such as an iron tunnel, are densely distributed. The proposed method measures the degree of spectral spreading through the analysis of the spectrum characteristics of the received radar signal under different road conditions. The proposed method can successfully detect iron tunnels. In addition, experimental results show that early detection and missing problem of a forward target vehicle in an iron tunnel under adaptive cruise control (ACC) is improved.