A Method of Improving SCR for Millimeter Wave FM-CW Radar without Knowledge of Target and Clutter Statistics

Frequency-Modulated-Continuous-Wave (FM-CW) radars transmit a waveform whose frequency changes linearly in time. Received echoes of these radars can be categorized into two types due to either targets or clutter. Generally, the received target signals have a stronger correlation with respect to different carrier frequencies than that of the received clutter signals. This paper discusses a method of improving Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) for millimeter wave FM-CW radar based on this statistical difference between the target and the clutter. The method approximates an autocorrelation function from received signals using a numerical averaging. A power spectrum of received signals is obtained by taking discrete Fourier-transform of this autocorrelation.