Harmonic clutter recognition and suppression for automotive radar sensors

Abstract

In this article, we propose a novel harmonic clutter recognition and suppression method to overcome the deterioration of a target- or vehicle-detection performance due to harmonic clutters. Although several studies have been performed on the reflection and diffraction on road surfaces for automotive radar sensors, most of them did not consider the case where metallic structures such as iron tunnels with greater reflection are densely distributed. The proposed method measures the periodicity of harmonic clutters by analyzing the spectral characteristics of the received radar signal with various road conditions. The proposed method can successfully recognize harmonic clutters. In addition, experimental results show that early detection of a target vehicle in an iron tunnel under adaptive cruise control is improved using the proposed clutter suppression method.