MRPT: Millimeter-Wave Radar-Based Pedestrian Trajectory Tracking for Autonomous Urban Driving

Pedestrians represent agile and low-observable targets, especially under adverse weather conditions, whose trajectory tracking plays a crucial role in determining pedestrian behavior in autonomous urban driving. Thus, this article presents a millimeter-wave radar-based pedestrian trajectory-tracking (MRPT) system that enables all-weather trajectory perception with high precision. More specifically, to improve the tracking performance in the presence of strong background clutters, a track-before-detection-based algorithm is proposed to address pedestrian detection and tracking jointly, instead of regarding them as two separate phases in conventional methods. After that, a continuous detection method based on the integration of target existence probability and the Markov transition matrix is proposed to achieve superior pedestrian detection performance by directly using unthresholded radar data. In addition, based on the binary-phase-multiplex (BPM) strategy, the proposed system is validated using a low-cost automotive frequency-modulated-continuous-waveform (FMCW) multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radar sensor. Consequently, extensive simulation and experimental results demonstrate that MRPT exhibits better pedestrian detection and tracking performance under low signal-noise-ratio (SNR) conditions compared with traditional methods.