Automotive Elevation Mapping with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
This enables radar to serve as a primary sensor for mapping fine details in complex driving environments, supporting autonomous perception decisions, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing InSAR techniques to automotive applications.
The paper tackled the problem of limited resolution and sensitivity in automotive radar by using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) to accurately localize detections in 3D space for urban and agricultural environments, generating point clouds with a low-compute approach.
Radar is a low-cost and ubiquitous automotive sensor, but is limited by array resolution and sensitivity when performing direction of arrival analysis. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a class of techniques to improve azimuth resolution and sensitivity for radar. Interferometric SAR (InSAR) can be used to extract elevation from the variations in phase measurements in SAR images. Utilizing InSAR we show that a typical, low-resolution radar array mounted on a vehicle can be used to accurately localize detections in 3D space for both urban and agricultural environments. We generate point clouds in each environment by combining InSAR with a signal processing scheme tailored to automotive driving. This low-compute approach allows radar to be used as a primary sensor to map fine details in complex driving environments, and be used to make autonomous perception decisions.