High-resolution 2D SAR imaging by the millimeter-wave automobile radar

Recently, many high-resolution sensors have been developed to realize autonomous car, or self-driving car, such as optical camera, LIDAR, Radar and so forth. The important capability of such sensors is maintain monitoring performance even in the bad weather condition such as dense fog, heavy rain, and snowfall as well as high-resolution performance. In this sense, the radar is promising one. The millimeter wave (MW) radar can use several GHz bandwidth, hence we can obtain centimeter order range resolution. However, a large aperture array should be required to obtain high angular resolution. This is a main drawback of the radar. To overcome this drawback we propose to use the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique for the automobile radar. The proposed MW-SAR technique is squint-mode SAR looking ahead aslant of the vehicle. Experimental results is also provided to demonstrate the performance of the technique.