Unambiguous Doppler Extension for FMCW Radar via Poisson Disk Sampling

The maximum unambiguous Doppler in classical saw-tooth frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is inherently limited by the sweep repetition frequency (SRF). In this letter, an unambiguous Doppler extension method for FMCW radar is proposed, based on the combination of Poisson disk sampling (PDS) and sparse recovery. The PDS is adopted in the slow time domain such that there are random intervals between adjacent transmitted sweeps and no overlaps. Taking advantages of the excellent spectrum antialiasing performance of PDS, the maximum unambiguous Doppler of FMCW radar can be extended without reducing the range resolution. Then, the iterative soft thresholding-like (IST-like) algorithm is utilized to reconstruct the accurate range-Doppler spectrum. Compared with the existing unambiguous Doppler extension methods, the proposed method performs better in multitarget and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the experiments on real FMCW radar data. © 2004-2012 IEEE.