DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF SYNTHETIC DATA GENERATOR AND PROCESSOR FOR FMCW

Abstract

Radar-based sensors have the capability of day/night all weather operation. This is the main advantages of radar sensors over optical one. Radio frequencies also the potential to penetrate through smoke and clouds. Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) technology is preferable to employ and exploit because it is low-priced, lightweight and compact. Other advantage of the FMCW technology is hidden in its continuous transmitting nature which is used in applications like Moving Target Indication (MTI). FMCW radars play a significant role in both military and civil applications. Airborne earth surveillance and its signal processing is very novel field of research now-a-days. The signal processing branch of imaging radar demands a heavy computational power and large memory requirements. Many algorithms for generating interpretable images have been implemented in literature previously. However they require intense computational power for high resolution images. To transform the raw data into realistic image is very expensive job. The purpose of this research is to develop the simulations for FMCW imaging radar, implemented in MATLAB. For this, synthetic data generating and processing software is developed. In first phase, for the validation of processor, a synthetic data generator for FMCW imaging radar is developed. Synthetic data generator simulates the two-dimensional, grayscale target image and also produces two-dimensional target reflectivity profile. In second phase, processing software for FMCW imaging radar is implemented which processes recorded raw data for realistic image formation. The final generated image is RDA (Range Doppler Algorithm) processed of raw data. Proper image formation algorithms are developed that gives finest performance. Thanks to these developed algorithms that give reasonable resolution in range and cross-range dimension respectively. The functioning of the software meets expected results when even operated on real-time data.