Compressive Range and Velocity Estimation Using Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave Radar

Signal processing plays an important role in radar application, including frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar used to estimate the distance of the targets from the radar and their velocity relative to the radar. It is thus understandable that any recent advances in signal processing research fields is likely to play important roles in the advances of radar signal processing. In the recent two decades, the application of compressive sampling (CS) concept on signals having a compressible or sparsity structure in a particular domain has been extensively studied by the signal processing community. In this paper, we study the application of CS on FMCW radar applications to estimate the distance and the velocity of the targets. The aim is to reduce both the sampling rate in the analog-to-digital converters and the amount of measurements (leading to a smaller capacity for data storage), while maintaining the quality of the estimation. First of all, we show in this work that a large amount of reduction in the collected measurements does not lead to a comparable reduction in the maximum distance and velocity that can be estimated by the FMCW radar. Next, we can observe from the RMSE computation that for noise variance of up to 10 mW and received sinusoidal with amplitude of 1 mW, the quality of the distance and velocity estimate is very acceptable even with a very strong compression.