Range-Doppler Map Improvement in FMCW Radar for Small Moving Drone Detection Using the Stationary Point Concentration Technique

Given the rapidly growing drone market, the development of drone detection radars has become highly important to prevent drones from damaging lives and property. Frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars have been frequently used for drone detection. Among the architectures of FMCW radar, a heterodyne architecture that involves different local oscillators and produces beat signals at the IF stage has often been chosen. The FMCW radar, however, has a chronic problem called leakage. In an earlier study, we proposed the stationary point concentration (SPC) technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of small drones by reducing the increase in noise floor caused by leakage. We demonstrated that the proposed technique increases the SNR of small hovering drones in the 1-D power spectrum. In this article, we newly analyze the practical problems in the heterodyne FMCW radar system. One is the 2-D noise floor increase in the range-Doppler (r-D) map due to the leakage, and the other is unwanted Doppler shifts. Then, we propose an upgraded theory and realization method of the SPC technique for the detection of the small moving drone by improving the r-D map. We prove that the proposed method not only reduces the 2-D noise floor by mitigating the leakage but also removes the unwanted Doppler shifts by the phase calibration. Consequently, we show that the proposed method increases the SNR of the small moving drone and corrects its velocity information at the same time in the r-D map.