A Target Detection Scheme With Decreased Complexity and Enhanced Performance for Range-Doppler FMCW Radar

In conventional fast-ramp-based target detection schemes for the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar systems, all chirp sequences are performed fully on two-dimensional fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) to estimate range and velocity of a target, and all range-Doppler cells are scanned by the two-dimensional (2-D) cell-averaging constant false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) detector to extract valid targets against background noise. This results in an extremely high computational complexity. To decrease the complexity while maintaining a desired performance, this article proposes a target detection scheme based on distributed one-dimensional (1-D) CA-CFAR and region-of-interest (ROI) preprocessing, which performs Doppler-FFT only for range ROI cells and scans only Doppler ROI cells to extract pretargets. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme significantly decreases complexity and simultaneously improves detection performance in terms of detection probability, figure of merit (FoM), and CFAR loss, as compared with the conventional schemes. The advantages of the proposed scheme over the conventional ones are further verified by field tests under multitarget scenario, using our recently developed FMCW radar with high angular resolution.