Polarimetric Signatures of a Passenger Car

For highly automated driving it is crucial to be able to perceive and fully understand the environment surrounding the vehicle. To achieve this goal, a combination of three different sensors is typically used: camera, lidar and radar. Radar's advantages in this setup are its instantaneous radial velocity estimation and its robustness against adverse weather conditions. Even more information, including shapes and orientations of geometries on sensed objects, can be gained by using a newly available automotive polarimetric radar. This work presents polarimetric signatures of a passenger car under various aspect angles. For the first time polarimetric scattering processes are spatially resolved in a real-world scenario using an automotive polarimetric radar allowing identification of car segment geometries and orientations. Applying this additional information to essential tasks in automated driving such as classification and tracking provides additional benefit.