Reduction of Sidelobe Effects in Automotive Polarimetric Radar Measurements

Radars are one of the sensor modalities employed in systems for automated driving, due to their robustness, instantaneous radial velocity estimation capability of targets and moderate costs. With the availability of polarimetric radars for automotive applications, the scattering matrices for detections on road users can be measured additionally. However, with limited sampling time and calibration errors resulting in sidelobes, the scattering matrices of objects located close to each other can mix and a wrong scattering mechanism is inferred for the targets, which is especially observable in the angular dimension. This paper presents an approach to decrease this mixing by using gradients along the dimension of interest to shift amplitudes and evaluates it on real world polarimetric radar data.