SAR Based Target Recognition and Elevation Estimation for Automotive Applications

This work details a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) set-up at 77 GHz which is used to accomplish the task of elevation estimation of various targets encountered in everyday traffic scenarios.The requirement for the system was to use a typical short range radar (SRR) which does not offer fine resolution in the elevation direction. The proposed approach uses the same transmit antenna along with two receive antennae which are spaced in the elevation direction to realise a rudimentary beamformer in the elevation dimension. This is then coupled with an AI approach which can recognise common classes of targets for added robustness in the complete signal processing chain.