4D High-Resolution Imagery of Point Clouds for Automotive mmWave Radar
Mengjie Jiang, Gang Xu, Hao Pei, Zeyun Feng, Shuai Ma, Hui Zhang, Wei Hong
Abstract
In the community of automotive millimeter wave radar, the recently developed concept of four-dimensional (4D) radar can provide high-resolution point clouds image with enhanced imaging performance. Currently, the density of point clouds for single-frame image is usually too sparse to satisfy the demands of target classification and recognition due to the limitation of Doppler and angle resolutions. To address the aforementioned issues, a novel algorithm is proposed for 4D high-resolution imagery generation of point clouds with extremely high Doppler and angle resolutions in this paper. For high Doppler resolution with high-dynamic, a novel velocity ambiguity resolution algorithm is proposed using a dual pulse repetition frequency (dual-PRF) waveform design embedded in an innovative time-division multiplexing & Doppler-division multiplexing MIMO (TDM-DDM-MIMO) framework. Meanwhile, an attractive complex-valued deep convolutional network (CV-DCN) of super-resolution direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is proposed only using single-frame data. To be specific, a spatial smoothing operator on array data is applied as input of the network, and a CV-DCN is designed to learn the transformation of the spatial spectrum from the end-to-end to effectively protect the spectrum extraction. Furthermore, experimental analysis is performed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed super-resolution DOA estimation algorithm. Finally, the 4D high-resolution imagery of point clouds is obtained by experiments in the parking lot.