Multi-Doppler resolution automotive radar

Automotive radars operate in challenging environments that include objects with similar position and speed as well as objects with diverse positions and velocities. Automated driving requires the radar to discriminate close objects and also to accurately estimate the position of the objects in the field-of-view. Doppler filtering is essential to fulfill this goal. In conventional automotive radars the Doppler processing has a fixed and predetermined filtering integration time and hence a fixed Doppler resolution. However, in this case, setting the Doppler resolution is a tradeoff between high resolution that enables discrimination of close objects and accurate estimation of their position. In this paper we develop a multi-resolution Doppler processing method that resolves this tradeoff. The performance advantages of multi-resolution Doppler processing compared to the conventional fixed Doppler resolution are evaluated in an automotive scenario. It is shown that the multi-resolution Doppler processing attains better discrimination of close objects as well as more accurate position estimation of the objects.