Performance Investigation of Automotive SAR Imaging

This paper investigates the potential of applying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to automotive applications using a short range vehicle-mounted Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar. The Range Migration Algorithm (RMA) is adopted in this work for SAR image formation as it is ideal for focusing range curvatures of targets at short ranges. The first part of this paper gives a brief overview of RMA based strip map SAR processing of FMCW radar signals. In the latter part, collected data of real world stationary targets such as cars, poles and buildings are processed providing high resolution SAR images of different synthetic aperture lengths. The obtained images are presented, discussed and compared in terms of cross range accuracy and resolution to show that high resolution target imaging can be achieved using automotive SAR.