Leakage Mitigation in Heterodyne FMCW Radar For Small Drone Detection with Stationary Point Concentration Technique

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital signal processing technique to reduce leakage noise in heterodyne FMCW radar, enhancing small drone detection capabilities without extra hardware.

Contribution

The paper proposes a stationary point concentration technique that mitigates leakage in heterodyne FMCW radar through frequency planning and digital processing, improving detection performance.

Findings

Significantly lowers the noise floor in the radar signal.

Enhances small drone detection without additional hardware.

Effective in reducing leakage-related noise increase.

Abstract

Recently, as the drones have become smaller and smarter, they are emerging as new threats to the military and the public. To prevent the threats, the development of the radar to detect the small drones is needed. The frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar is one of the radar types for the drone detection. The heterodyne architecture for the FMCW radar is often applied to resolve the dc offset problem. However, the leakage from a transmitter into a receiver, the notorious problem of the FMCW radar, is still a challenging problem. Especially, the phase noise of the leakage increases the noise floor and deteriorates the signal to noise ratio. In order to mitigate this problem, in this paper, the stationary point concentration technique is proposed. Without additional hardware, the proposed technique can be implemented through frequency planning and digital signal processing. The results show that the proposed technique significantly lowers the noise floor over the desired range domain.