Mutual interference mitigation for automotive FMCW radar based on TRPCA

doi:10.23919/JSEE.2026.000123

Abstract

Abstract:

The dramatic rise in vehicle numbers and the development of autonomous driving technology have underscored the importance of accurate environment perception to prevent traffic accidents. Due to its distinctive advantages, millimeter-wave radar has emerged as the dominant type of vehicle-mounted sensor. However, frequency band for automotive radar is restricted to 76−81 GHz, resulting in insufficient spectrum resources because of the high-resolution requirement. The rapid increase of radars in the actual traffic environment will inevitably lead to mutual interference between radars, posing a potential threat to public transportation. To address this problem, this paper investigates the mutual interference of automotive frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars, and mitigates the mutual interference utilizing a low-rank tensor model. By stacking the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) matrix of all chirps in a single channel as tensors, a tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) algorithm is employed to separate the target signal and the interference. Mutual interference of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar could be suppressed by applying TRPCA in all channels. Both simulations and numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and lower root mean square error (RMSE) compared with other methods, thereby proving its superior interference suppression capability in different practical scenarios.

Key words: automotive frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar, mutual interference, interference mitigation, tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA)

Ken Chen, Xinyu Guan, Hui Zhang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yan Huang, Xiaowei Zhu, Wei Hong. Mutual interference mitigation for automotive FMCW radar based on TRPCA[J]. Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics, 2026, 37(4): 1120-1137.

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Parameters	Victim	Interferer
Start frequency/GHz	76.5	76.505
Chirp duration/${\text{μs}}$	46.079	51.079
Repetition period/${\text{μs}}$	51.2	101.08
Slope/(MHz/${\text{μs}}$)	2.4634	−2.4634
Number of chirps	64	33
Number of samples	1024	1277
Sampling rate/MHz	25	25
Bandwidth/MHz	113.51	125.828

Indicator	Method
Indicator	Notch	CFAR-Z	CFAR-AC	Beat-frequency interpolation	Kalman filter	TRPCA
SINR of Target 1	10.6342	5.9888	4.9058	8.0998	4.4440	21.7833
SINR of Target 2	10.3302	4.9592	3.9283	8.1075	3.9078	20.7642
RMSE	0.9357	0.9395	0.9577	0.8285	0.8742	0.6997

Parameter	Victim	Interferer
Start Frequency/GHz	79.47	77
Chirp duration/${\text{μs}}$	29.5	110
Slope/(MHz/${\text{μs}}$)	−32.23	32.23
Number of Chirps	128	128
Number of samples	512	512
Bandwidth/MHz	950	3.5453

Indicator	Method
Indicator	Notch	CFAR-Z	CFAR-AC	Beat-frequency interpolation	Kalman filter	TRPCA
SINR of Target 1/dB	11.8298	12.0262	11.9737	12.0215	4.9314	15.4977
SINR of Target 2/dB	15.5758	15.8541	15.7813	15.8507	7.2385	18.9219
SINR of Target 3/dB	16.5618	16.7746	16.6958	16.7699	7.2136	19.7379
RMSE	0.5956	0.5933	0.5935	0.5941	0.7621	0.4596

Parameter	Victim	Interferer
Start frequency/GHz	79.47	77
Chirp Duration/${\text{μs}}$	105	110
Slope/(MHz/${\text{μs}}$)	−16.11	32.23
Number of chirps	128	128
Number of samples	512	512
Bandwidth/GHz	1.6915	3.5453