For an automotive pedestrian detection radar system, fast-ramp based 2D range-Doppler Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar is effective for distinguishing between moving targets and unwanted clutter. However, when a weak moving target such as a pedestrian exists together with strong clutter, the pedestrian may be masked by the side-lobe of the clutter even though they are notably separated in the Doppler dimension. To prevent this problem, one popular solution is the use of a windowing scheme with a weighting function. However, this method leads to a spread spectrum, so the pedestrian with weak signal power and slow Doppler may also be masked by the main-lobe of clutter. With a fast-ramp based FMCW radar, if the target is moving, the complex spectrum of the range- Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is changed with a constant phase difference over ramps. In contrast, the clutter exhibits constant phase irrespective of the ramps. Based on this fact, in this paper we propose a pedestrian detection for highly cluttered environments using a coherent phase difference method. By detecting the coherent phase difference from the complex spectrum of the range-FFT, we first extract the range profile of the moving pedestrians. Then, through the Doppler FFT, we obtain the 2D range-Doppler map for only the pedestrian. To test the proposed detection scheme, we have developed a real-time data logging system with a 24 GHz FMCW transceiver. In laboratory tests, we verified that the signal processing results from the proposed method were much better than those expected from the conventional 2D FFT-based detection method.

In this paper, we propose a Doppler-spectrum feature-based human–vehicle classification scheme for an FMCW (frequency-modulated continuous wave) radar sensor. We introduce three novel features referred to as the scattering point count, scattering point difference, and magnitude difference rate features based on the characteristics of the Doppler spectrum in two successive frames. We also use an SVM (support vector machine) and BDT (binary decision tree) for training and validation of the three aforementioned features. We measured the signals using a 24-GHz FMCW radar front-end module and a real-time data acquisition module and extracted three features from a walking human and a moving vehicle in the field. We then repeatedly measured the classification decision rate of the proposed algorithm using the SVM and BDT, finding that the average performance exceeded 99% and 96% for the walking human and the moving vehicle, respectively.

We designed and developed a 24 GHz surveillance FMCW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave) radar with a software-reconfigurable baseband. The developed radar system consists of transceiver, two selectable transmit antennas, eight parallel receive antennas, and a back-end module for data logging and to control the transceiver. The architecture of the developed radar system can support various waveforms, gain control of receive amplifiers, and allow the selection of two transmit antennas. To do this, we implemented the transceiver using a frequency synthesizer device and a two-step VGA (Variable Gain Amplifier) along with switch-controlled transmit antennas. To support high speed implementation features along with good flexibility, we developed a back-end module based on a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) with a parallel architecture for the real-time data logging of the beat signals received from a multichannel 24 GHz transceiver. To verify the feasibility of the developed radar system, signal processing algorithms were implemented on a host PC. All measurements were carried out in an anechoic chamber to extract a 3D range-Doppler-angle map and target detections. We expect that the developed software-reconfigurable radar system will be useful in various surveillance applications.

This article presents a 24-GHz highly integrated phased array radar transceiver with four transmitters (TXs) and four receivers (RXs). To realize a wide field of view (FoV) and more efficiently reject the clutters, an automatic beam steering mode is realized. A beam scanning generator (BSG) and a frequency sweep generator (FSG) are proposed to steer the beam for each frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) waveform sequence. The shape of the FMCW waveform, the number of beams, and the steering angles of beams can be reconfigured by initially setting the FSG and BSG. The TXs achieve an output power of 10.6 dBm and beam steering covering angles up to $\pm$ 50 $^{\circ}$ through a three-stage power amplifier (PA), a 6-bit phase shifter, and a 4-bit attenuator. The RXs achieve a noise figure (NF) of 13.5 dB and an overall gain of 105 dB. In the RXs, a two-stage low-noise amplifier (LNA) employs a low-k transformer for flat band gain. A range-compensation filter with a total 40-dB slope is realized using a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) with DC offset cancellation (DCOC) and first-stage biquad bandpass filter (BPF). The proposed transceiver was fabricated using 65-nm CMOS with an area of 3 $\times$ 2.8 mm $^{2}$ .

In this paper, we proposed a human-vehicle classification scheme using a Doppler spectrum distribution based on 2D Range-Doppler FMCW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave). Typically, because humans have non-rigid motion, multiple reflection points can appear on the Doppler spectrum. However, in the actual field, the Doppler spectrum distribution of a walking human is highly variable over time. Thus method using only this characteristic of the extended Doppler spectrum is limited with regard to human-vehicle classification. In order to improve the target classification performance, we designed two feature. The first is the Doppler spectrum extension features, which is expressed as the number of Doppler reflection points with magnitudes exceeding reference threshold. Next, we defined the Doppler spectrum variance feature, which is extracted as the difference the reflection points between two successive frames. We can determine how the Doppler spectrum expands with the first feature, and how the Doppler spectra change based on the second feature. To verify the proposed target classification scheme, we measured real data using a 24 GHz FMCW transceiver on an actual road with various scenarios of walking humans and moving vehicles. From an analysis of the results, we confirmed that the thresholds effectively classify humans and vehicles based on the two proposed features. Finally, we verified that the results of the proposed classification scheme using the two features were much better than those using the first feature alone.

In this paper, we propose a Doppler spectrum-based passenger detection scheme for a CW (Continuous Wave) radar sensor in vehicle applications. First, we design two new features, referred to as an ‘extended degree of scattering points’ and a ‘different degree of scattering points’ to represent the characteristics of the non-rigid motion of a moving human in a vehicle. We also design one newly defined feature referred to as the ‘presence of vital signs’, which is related to extracting the Doppler frequency of chest movements due to breathing. Additionally, we use a BDT (Binary Decision Tree) for machine learning during the training and test steps with these three extracted features. We used a 2.45 GHz CW radar front-end module with a single receive antenna and a real-time data acquisition module. Moreover, we built a test-bed with a structure similar to that of an actual vehicle interior. With the test-bed, we measured radar signals in various scenarios. We then repeatedly assessed the classification accuracy and classification error rate using the proposed algorithm with the BDT. We found an average classification accuracy rate of 98.6% for a human with or without motion.