Recent evolution of automotive imaging radar and its information content

Driven by the demand to develop self-driving cars, automotive radars evolve rapidly at this time. Current high end radars therefore have very little in common with the radars that were developed just a few years ago and are being built into today's car series. Anyway, since at least two decades such sensors are referred to as imaging radars, although the set of possible applications has changed significantly. This study displays the leap in the evolution of automotive imaging radars on the example of the Astyx HiRes radar and elucidates the additional information that becomes available for autonomous driving functions like freespace modelling and target classification. In particular, it will be shown that the image quality of a modern high end radar suffices to apply computer vision techniques that were reserved for optical or light detection and ranging (LIDAR) images until now.