Going Below and Beyond, Off-the-Grid Velocity Estimation from 1-bit Radar Measurements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel off-the-grid velocity estimation method from 1-bit radar measurements, demonstrating that high-resolution target velocities can be accurately estimated despite extreme quantization, with improvements over traditional on-the-grid approaches.

Contribution

It develops a modified continuous orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm tailored for 1-bit radar data, enabling off-the-grid velocity estimation and highlighting the importance of dithering for multiple target scenarios.

Findings

Velocity estimation remains accurate with 1-bit measurements.

Performance surpasses traditional on-the-grid methods.

Dithering improves multi-target velocity estimation.

Abstract

In this paper we propose to bridge the gap between using extremely low resolution 1-bit measurements and estimating targets' parameters, such as their velocities, that exist in a continuum, i.e., by performing Off-the-Grid estimation. To that end, a Continuous version of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (COMP) is modified in order to leverage the 1-bit measurements coming from a simple Doppler Radar. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, we show that although the resolution of the acquisition is dramatically reduced, velocity estimation of multiple targets can still be achieved and reaches performances beyond classic On-the-Grid methods. Furthermore, we show empirically that adding a random and uniform dithering before the quantization is necessary when estimating more than one target.