Work

Single-Frame MIMO Radar Velocity Vector Estimation via Multi-Bounce Scattering

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Radars are widely adopted for autonomous navigation and vehicular networking due to their robustness to weather conditions as compared to visible light cameras and lidars. However, radars currently struggle with differentiating static vs tangentially moving objects within asingle radar framesince both yield the same Doppler along line-of-sight paths to the radar. Prior solutions deploy multiple radar or visible light camera modules to form a multi-“look” synthetic aperture for estimating the single-frame velocity vectors, to estimate tangential and radial velocity components of moving objects leading to higher system costs. In this paper, we propose to exploit multi-bounce scattering from secondary static objects in the environment, e.g., building pillars, walls, etc., to form an effective multi-“look” synthetic aperture for single-frame velocity vector estimation with asinglemultiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radar, thus reducing the overall system cost and removing the need for multi-module synchronization. We present a comprehensive theoretical and experiment evaluation of our scheme, demonstrating a$4.5 \times$reduction in the error for estimating moving objects' velocity vectors over comparable single-radar baselines.

Source: IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging

DOI: 10.1109/tci.2025.3594013

Authors: Nishant Mehrotra, Divyanshu Pandey, Upamanyu Madhow, Yasamin Mostofi, Ashutosh Sabharwal

Institutions: Rice University, University of California, Santa Barbara

Language: English

Topic: Radar Systems and Signal Processing

Subfield: Aerospace Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,645

Funder: National Science Foundation