Velocity Estimation of Wheeled Vehicles with Micro-Doppler Phenomenon for Automotive Radar

Over the last years, radar based driver assistance and active safety systems have been widely used all over the world. Multiple targets can be simultaneously detected and tracked with the range, velocity and azimuth information of targets measured by millimeter-wave automotive radar sensors. However, the micro-Doppler phenomenon resulting from rolling wheels makes it difficult to get the correct estimate of the wheeled vehicle's radial velocity. Without the accurate velocity estimation of wheeled vehicles, Lane Change Assistant (LCA) may wrongly issue an alarm and Blind Spot Detection (BSD) may terminate an alarm too late or too early in 24GHz BSD & LCA radar system. In this paper a novel method is proposed to get the accurate velocity estimation of wheeled vehicles with micro-Doppler phenomenon. Based on the proposed algorithm that takes the symmetry of micro-Doppler spectrum, spatial locations of the reflectors and the relative amplitudes of various Doppler components into account together, the reflector corresponding to the vehicle body is extracted from those reflectors which belong to the same target. The validity of the proposed method has been verified by the Experimental results.