Mitigation of Leakage in FMCW Radars by Background Subtraction and Whitening

Leakage in frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar with a homodyne receiver induces strong signal components in the lower frequency parts of the radar observations. There, the dynamic range of the observations has been reduced, such that close and weak targets are hard to detect. In this letter, a signal processing method is proposed to mitigate the leakage. First, background subtraction is applied to cancel the leakage. As the cancellation is imperfect, a noisy signal portion remains: the leakage noise. A statistical model is developed to describe the leakage noise as a colored noise process. This model is parameterized from measurements and used to whiten the observations. As a result, the dynamic range is improved, and the close targets become better detectable.