Automotive Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging using TDM-MIMO

Using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) structure for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation brings advantages such as azimuth or elevation beamforming with small aperture size. Due to the simplicity of time-division multiplexing (TDM), it became a widely used approach for 77-GHz automotive radar systems. However, this method brings some limitations for platform movement and represents particular drawbacks in the reconstructed images. This paper tries to eliminate restrictions and reduce artifacts using a random antenna activation pattern. The proposed idea leads to significant improvements for various simulation scenarios for our defined antenna structure.