A Robust Data Compression Engine Dedicated For FMCW Radar RDM

Time-domain signals are typically transformed using a 2D-FFT to generate the Range Doppler Map (RDM) in FMCW radar data processing. Subsequently, 2D-CFAR is applied to the RDM for target detection, while Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation is utilized to obtain the angular information of the target, thus enabling the acquisition of the target’s spatial information. As the demand for accurate target information increases, the volume of data in each RDM frame also increases. This escalation necessitates significant hardware resources and an area to store the RDM in on-chip SRAM or a large bandwidth to accommodate it in off-chip DDRs. Furthermore, DDR controllers require substantial on-chip resources. To address this challenge, we propose a compression algorithm named APFG, which comprises Amplitude-Phase Transformation (APT), Fix-to-Float (Fix2Float), and Exponential Sharing (ESH). Experimental results demonstrate that this algorithm is applicable across various scenarios, CFAR types, and CFAR configurations, achieving high compression ratios while ensuring the accuracy of CFAR and DOA estimates. Specifically, it achieves a compression ratio of less than 14% when Pce is below 1% and a compression ratio of nearly 30% when Pde is around 2%.