A sidelobe suppression algorithm for 77 GHz MIMO radars

77 GHz radar has become a promising approach to enhance automotive safety by quickly detecting and identifying targets around the vehicle, especially in harsh weather conditions. This requires 77 GHz radars to provide environmental imaging with high resolution and reliability. However, radar images are easily blurred by sidelobes and background noises, which makes it difficult to extract real target information. In this paper, a sidelobe suppression algorithm based on the point spread function (PSF) and complex-valued neural network has been proposed to discriminate and suppress unwanted sidelobes while maintaining mainlobes referring to targets. To overcome the scarcity of real-world 77 GHz multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar datasets, this paper derives the formula of PSF for 77 GHz MIMO radars in detail and exploits the PSF to generate simulated datasets for training. In addition, to be compatible with the complex-valued radar datasets, a customized neural network model has also been established in this paper. The well-trained neural network is further adopted to suppress sidelobes on real-world radar images. Comprehensive simulations and measurements have proved the superior performance of the proposed method, especially in cases with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), large channel mismatches, small target Radar Cross-Section (RCS) and large observation angle. •This paper derived the point spread function for 77 GHz MIMO radars.•A complex-valued neural network model was established to cope with raw radar data.•A 77 GHz radar model based on PSF was established to train the neural network.