Enhanced Target Detection in High-Intensity Clutter Environments for Automotive Radar Systems

In some road environments, such as those containing iron tunnels and guardrails, a meaningful target in the field of view of an automotive radar system cannot be detected because of the presence of high-intensity clutter signals. Thus, an automotive radar system requires an enhanced target detection method in environments such as these. In this paper, we propose a method to suppress the high-intensity clutter signals by using the relationship between the up-chirp and down-chirp received radar signals. The use of this relationship enables us to remove the signal components corresponding to the clutter from the received signal. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by using the actual measurement data obtained from a commercialized automotive radar system. The results show that our proposed algorithm provides more stable and reliable target detection performance by suppressing the high-intensity clutter signals.