Low Speed Target SAR Imaging Based on MIMO FMCW Radar

Automotive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are rapidly emerging as a candidate technological solution to enable a high-resolution environment awareness for autonomous driving. This paper deals with the SAR imaging of a low-speed target using a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar platform, which is quite common in the general vehicle automatic driving systems. The low-resolution SAR image is constructed with time domain back projection. And the final SAR image is obtained by coherently summing all the complex-valued low-resolution MIMO images along the synthetic aperture. We analyze the influence of target slow motion on SAR image quality with simulated data. And field experiments have shown that the proposed process can effectively realize the SAR perception of low speed targets.