Gridless DOA Estimation with Extended Array Aperture in Automotive Radar Applications

Millimeter-wave automotive radar has become an essential tool for autonomous driving, providing reliable sensing capabilities under various environmental conditions. To reduce hardware size and cost, sparse arrays are widely employed in automotive radar systems. Additionally, because the targets detected by automotive radar typically exhibit sparsity, compressed sensing-based algorithms have been utilized for sparse array reconstruction, achieving superior performance. However, traditional compressed sensing algorithms generally assume that targets are located on a finite set of grid points and perform sparse reconstruction based on predefined grids. When targets are off-grid, significant off-grid errors can occur. To address this issue, we propose an automotive radar sparse reconstruction algorithm based on accelerated Atomic Norm Minimization (ANM). By using the Iterative Vandermonde Decomposition and Shrinkage Threshold (IVDST) algorithm, we can achieve fast ANM, which effectively mitigates off-grid errors while reducing reconstruction complexity. Furthermore, we adopt a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) detector to eliminate noise and clutter in the automotive radar operating environment. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm significantly improves reconstruction accuracy compared to the iterative soft threshold (IST) algorithm while maintaining the same computational complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in practical applications is further validated through real-world data experiments, demonstrating its superior capability in clutter elimination.