Sensor modelling for radar-based occupancy mapping

This paper addresses the issue of creating a sensor model for a new short-range 24GHz close proximity detection (CPD) radar. The CPD radar is designed to provide improved situational awareness to the driver of a large vehicle. It is able to detect light vehicles and other targets at ranges from 2.2m to 45m within an arc of 160° azimuth, but radar measurements contain data from noise and clutter which must be filtered out. Dynamic thresholds such as constant false-alarm rate (CFAR) processors [19] do not work well with short measurement vectors or targets that occupy multiple measurement bins. In this paper, a new method is used where measurements of environmental noise, clutter and targets are used to calculate the false alarm and target detection probabilities for each bin and develop a fixed detection threshold for each bin. This filter is used to construct a sensor model which maps measurement power to probability of bin occupancy, which is then used to generate an occupancy grid map of the environment from CPD radar measurements.