Automotive Elevation Mapping with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) can be used with low-resolution automotive radar to generate accurate 3D elevation maps, enhancing autonomous perception in urban and agricultural settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel application of InSAR with low-resolution automotive radar to produce detailed 3D point clouds for autonomous driving environments.

Findings

Accurate 3D localization using low-resolution radar with InSAR.

Effective generation of detailed point clouds in urban and agricultural environments.

Low-compute approach suitable for real-time autonomous perception.

Abstract

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.