For the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar, the angle resolution of the generated point cloud map (PCM) is limited by the number of receiver antennas and the interference of multi-target environments. This paper proposes an improved scheme for high-resolution PCM generation based on a 77 GHz FMCW radar system. The scheme consists of a method to synthesize an equivalent virtual array based on the time-division multiplexing (TDM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique and an improved target detection algorithm based on multi-channel fusion. The results show that the proposed scheme could suppress the noise floor and improve the accuracy of target detection by 1.33 times compared to a conventional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector in a multi-target environment. Moreover, by applying the proposed scheme, the angle resolution of the PCM generated by the radar system reaches 1.3022 degrees.

FMCW radar; TDM-MIMO; virtual array; high-resolution; point cloud map (PCM)