Automotive Radar Interference Mitigation with Fast-Time-Frequency Mode Retrieval

This paper considers mutual interference mitigation (MIM) for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) automotive radar. Particularly, we exploit distinguished features of target and interference components in the fast-time-frequency (fTF) representation and, as opposed to existing fast-time MIM methods on nulling the interference component, propose to directly recover the underwhelmed target component via the fast-time-frequency mode retrieval (fTFMR). This is achieved by utilizing the Fourier synchrosqueezed transform (FSST) and introducing robust ridge detection that, in combination, guarantees that the recovered fast-time errors of the target signal are bounded at separable time intervals. Comprehensive performance comparison with a list of baseline methods shows that the proposed MIM method yields higher output signal-to-interference-noise ratios (SINRs) at both the range and velocity domains and reduces the false alarm.