IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL.
70, 2021
A Target Detection Scheme With Decreased
Complexity and Enhanced Performance for
Range-Doppler FMCW Radar
Qiangwen Zheng , Lijie Yang , Yaping Xie , Junjie Li , Tang Hu , Jiang Zhu , Member, IEEE,
Chunyi Song , Member, IEEE, and Zhiwei Xu , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— In conventional fast-ramp-based target detection
schemes for the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW)
radar systems, all chirp sequences are performed fully on
two-dimensional fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) to estimate
range and velocity of a target, and all range-Doppler cells are
scanned by the two-dimensional (2-D) cell-averaging constant
false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) detector to extract valid targets
against background noise. This results in an extremely high
computational complexity. To decrease the complexity while
maintaining a desired performance, this article proposes a target
detection scheme based on distributed one-dimensional (1-D)
CA-CFAR and region-of-interest (ROI) preprocessing, which
performs Doppler-FFT only for range ROI cells and scans only
Doppler ROI cells to extract pretargets. Simulation results indi-
cate that the proposed scheme significantly decreases complexity
and simultaneously improves detection performance in terms of
detection probability, figure of merit (FoM), and CFAR loss,
as compared with the conventional schemes. The advantages
of the proposed scheme over the conventional ones are further
verified by field tests under multitarget scenario, using our
recently developed FMCW radar with high angular resolution.
Index Terms— Detection analysis, frequency modulated con-
tinuous wave (FMCW) radar, low complexity, region of interest
(ROI), target detection.
I. I NTRODUCTION
F REQUENCY modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar
has increasingly attracted interests in recent years, due
Manuscript received May 25, 2020; accepted September 16, 2020. Date
of publication September 28, 2020; date of current version December 7,
2020. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61971379, in part by the Zhejiang
Lab through the Major Scientific Project under Grant 2018DD0ZX01, in part
by the Leading Innovative and Entrepreneur Team Introduction Program of
Zhejiang under Grant 2018R01001, in part by the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities, and in part by the Zhejiang Institute
of Standardization under Project 2019SY05WX0007. The Associate Editor
coordinating the review process was Shoaib Amin. (Corresponding author:
Chunyi Song.)
Qiangwen Zheng, Yaping Xie, and Junjie Li are with the Institute of
Marine Electronic and Intelligent System, Ocean College, Zhejiang University,
Zhoushan 316021, China.
Lijie Yang and Tang Hu are with the Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou 310006,
China.
Jiang Zhu, Chunyi Song, and Zhiwei Xu are with the Institute of Marine
Electronic and Intelligent System, Ocean College, Zhejiang University,
Zhoushan 316021, China, also with the Engineering Research Center of
Oceanic Sensing Technology and Equipment, Ministry of Education, Zhejiang
University, Zhoushan 316021, China, and also with the Key Laboratory of
Ocean Observation-Imaging Testbed of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Univer-
sity, Zhoushan 316021, China (e-mail: cysong@zju.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2020.3027407
1557-9662 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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8001113
to its superior performance in target detection and local-
ization [1]–[3]. Compared with lidar, ultrasound, and video
cameras, which are also the widely used sensors, the FMCW
radar is more robust for target detection under bad weather
conditions of heavy rain, snow, and dense fog [4], and is,
therefore, widely used in applications of automotive [5],
security [6], and surveillance [7].
The fast-ramp-based two-dimensional (2-D) fast Fourier
transform (FFT) is used for estimating range and velocity
of targets in FMCW radar systems, and all chirp signals
are performed with the 2-D FFT operations regardless of
targets numbers. This has resulted in extraneous computa-
tional complexity [8]. A peak-detection algorithm needs to be
applied for identifying presence or absence of valid targets
in range-Doppler matrix (RDM) [9] and further extracting
the corresponding location and motion parameters against
background noise [10], too.
Recently, some parameter estimation schemes with low
complexity have been studied [11]–[13], which are only
applicable to specific scenarios. A pedestrian detection scheme
is developed in [11] for weak moving target detection under
strong clutter, which first detects the coherent phase dif-
ference from the spectrum data obtained from range-FFT
operation, and then only the range profiles of moving pedes-
trians are extracted and further performed Doppler-FFT oper-
ation. The scheme is thus invalid for weak stationary target.
Hyun et al. [12] propose a region-of-interest (ROI) processing
scheme to decrease the complexity of blind spot detection,
which, however, is only applicable to limited number of
targets. The improved moving target indicator (MIT) scheme
in [13] solves the blind-speed problem and reduces the com-
putational complexity by using random dual chirps, at the
expense of losing the location information of stationary targets
and the Doppler information of moving targets.
To realize accurate identification of valid targets against
background noise, the constant false alarm rate (CFAR)
detection has been developed, which mitigates the impact
of background noise by automatically adjusting the detec-
tion threshold [14]–[16]. To fully utilize the characteristics
of targets in both range and Doppler domains, a 2-D rec-
tangle reference window is employed to derive the local
noise level for the conventional 2-D cell-averaging CFAR
(CA-CFAR) detection, realized by averaging the power of
multiple range-Doppler cells over the reference window [17].
8001113 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

where A T is the amplitude of the transmitted chirp signal, f 0

is the starting frequency, μ is the frequency modulated slope,
i.e., μ = B/T with B representing the bandwidth of the chirp
signal, and rect((t − T v2/T )) is the normalized rectangular
window and is defined as
  
t − T /2 1, |t − T /2| ≤T /2
rect = (2)
T 0, |t − T /2| >T /2

Therefore, one frame of transmitted signals x(t) is given by

Fig. 1. Illustration of the transmitted and received signals of FMCW radar.

L−1
x(t) = x 0 (t−lT ) (3)
A 2-D cross reference window is proposed and applied in [18] l=0

to reduce the number of extraneous reference cells at the
expense of degrading a certain detection accuracy. To fully
utilize the energy distribution features of targets [19], a 2-D
circular reference window is proposed to improve estimation
of background noise and detection of valid targets [20]. How-
ever, the abovementioned 2-D CA-CFAR detectors need to
scan every range-Doppler cell to identify valid targets against
background noise, resulting in extraneous computation.
Aiming at decreasing complexity while guaranteeing detec-
tion performance, we propose a novel target detection scheme
where l = 0, 1, . . . , L −1 and L is the number of chirp signals
in one frame. Then, we have the total time duration TF = LT .
In the FMCW radar system, the transmitted chirp signals are
received by the receiver antennas after propagation. Suppose
that the echo signals received by a single receiver antenna are
reflected by M distinctive targets, i.e., the superposition of
the received signals for the lth transmitted chirp signal can be
expressed as

M

for range-Doppler FMCW radar in this work. With conduct- r (t, l) = A(m) −1
R A T x 0 (t−τm − lT ) + ω(l, t) (4)
ing ROI preprocessing in range and Doppler domains, only m=1

range-Doppler cells representing existence of valid targets are where m = 1, 2, . . . , M and M is the total number of
filtered out and processed by Doppler-FFT and CA-CFAR targets, A(m)
R and τm denote the received signal’s amplitude
operations. Meanwhile, distributed 1-D CA-CFAR operations and the round-trip time delay for the mth specific target,
are performed three times to fully utilize the information of respectively, and ω(l, t) is the additive white Gaussian noise
targets in both range and Doppler domains, to improve the (AWGN). Then, the amplitude of the received signal A(m)R can
detection performance. In the end, a peak focus algorithm is be expressed as [22]
carried out on the produced pretargets to further identify the √
main-lobe cells of valid targets while decreasing the ghost σm G T G R
A(m) = A (5)
(2Rm )α
target cells. The ghost target here represents a target that does R T

not truly exist; the detection of a ghost target then means the
occurrence of false alarm [21].
The structure of this article is organized as follows.
Section II briefly introduces the system model and conven-
tional detection scheme. The proposed detection scheme is
presented in Section III. Simulation results are demonstrated
and analyzed in Section IV. Section V shows the field test
results in multitarget situation. Finally, the conclusion is drawn
in Section VI.
II. FMCW R ADAR S YSTEM M ODEL AND
C ONVENTIONAL D ETECTION S CHEME
A. FMCW Radar System Model
This section introduces the FMCW radar system model.
where σm is the reflection coefficient of radar cross section
(RCS) for the mth target, G T and G R , respectively, are the
gain of transmitter antenna and that of receiver antenna, Rm
is the range between the mth target and the radar sensor, and
α is the attenuation coefficient decided by the propagation
environment.
The received signals are then conjugately mixed with the
transmitted signals to transform the wideband nonstationary
signals into the superposition of a series of low-frequency
single-tone signals, the so-called beat signal, followed by a
low-pass filtering. The operation is repeated for L consecu-
tive chirp signals. The beat signal corresponding to the lth
transmitted chirp signal then can be expressed as

M

Fig. 1 shows the transmitted and received signals of FMCW s(l, t) = x(t)r ∗ (l, t) = A(m)
R AT
radar. The frequency of the FMCW chirp signal, which   m=1  
is a wideband nonstationary signal, increases linearly with Bτ
× exp j 2πμτm t + 2π f 0 τm 1 −
transmitted time during the modulation duration T . A single 2 f0 T
FMCW chirp signal x 0 (t) is expressed as + ws (l, t) (6)
   
t − T /2 μ  where (·)∗ is the complex conjugate, and
x 0 (t) = A T rect exp j 2π f 0 t + t 2 (1)
T 2 ws (l, t) =x(t)ω∗ (l, t). Since f 0 B and T  τ in reality [23],

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ZHENG et al.: TARGET DETECTION SCHEME WITH DECREASED COMPLEXITY AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE 8001113

(6) is simplified as

M
s(l, t) = A(m)
R A T exp( j (2πμτm t +2π f 0 τm ))+ws (l, t).
m=1
(7)
The round-trip time delay of the lth transmitted chirp signal
for the mth target can be further extended as
2Rm +2v m lT
τm,l = (8)
c
where c is the speed of light and v m is the radical velocity of
the mth target. Substituting (8) into (7), s(l, t) can be rewritten
as Fig. 2. Schematic of the 2-D CA-CFAR detector.

M
s(l, t)= am exp( j (2π( fr,m t + fd,m lT +γm )))+ws (l,t) (9)
where q is the index of Doppler bins in the Doppler domain
m=1
and 1 ≤ q ≤ NC , NC is the number of Doppler-FFT points.
where am is the mth complex amplitude term, i.e., am = Therefore, applying the 2-D FFT operation, an RDM is
A(m)
R A T exp( j (4π f 0 Rm /c)), f r,m = 2μR m /c is the range fre- produced containing range and velocity information of targets
quency of the mth target, fd,m = 2 f 0 v m /c is the Doppler and undesired clutter or noise background, as follows:
frequency of the mth target, γm = 2μv m lT t/c is the range- ⎡ ⎤
Doppler-coupling, and can be neglected in the 2-D FFT S̃(1, 1) S̃(2, 1) · · · S̃(NC , 1)
operation [24]. ⎢ S̃(1, 2) S̃(2, 2) · · · S̃(NC , 2) ⎥
⎢ ⎥
The corresponding continuous beat signal s(l, t) is sam- RDM = ⎢ .. .. .. .. ⎥. (13)
⎣ . . . . ⎦
pled with f s to produce N samples within the duration T ,
S̃(1,NS ) S̃(2,NS ) · · · S̃(NC ,NS )
as follows:

M To extract targets’ parameters against background noise,
s(l, n) = am exp( j (2π( fr,m nTs + f d,m lT +γm )))+ws (l, n) the 2-D CA-CFAR detector is executed to estimate the local
m=1 noise power based on the arithmetic mean of the neighborhood
(10) areas. Fig. 2 depicts the schematic of 2-D CA-CFAR detector.
In Fig. 2, the reference window consists of a cell under test
where fs is the sampling frequency, Ts = 1/ f s is the sam- (CUT), guard cells, and reference cells. The reference cells
pling interval, and N = T /Ts is the numbers of samples, are regarded as the samples of noise estimate around the CUT.
n= 0, 1, . . . , N−1. First, the RDM is carried out the square-law operation, i.e.,
2
Z (q, k) = | S̃(q, k)| . Then, the local noise power around the
B. Conventional Target Detection Scheme current CUT is estimated as
This section briefly illustrates the conventional target detec- 1 
Nr
tion scheme for FMCW radar, which consists of a 2-D FFT P(q, k) = Z (nr ) (14)
Nr n =1
and a 2-D CA-CFAR algorithm [3], [18]. The beat signal can r

be denoted by a 2-D sinusoidal waveform across two time

where (q, k) is the coordinates of the current CUT, Nr
indices [25], which contain the fast time index n and the
is the number of reference cells in the reference window,
slow time index l. To estimate the range information, L times
and Z (nr ) is the power of each reference cell. Accordingly,
N S -point range-FFTs across the fast time are performed on the
the detection threshold is denoted by T (q, k) = α · P(q, k),
beat signal sequences s(l, n). Thus, the kth range-FFT output −1/N
with α = Nr (Pfa r − 1) representing the threshold scaling
of the lth sampling sequence s(l, n) is expressed as
factor and Pfa denoting the desired false alarm probability. The
Ns  threshold can dynamically adopt to the change of background
2π
S(l, k) = s(l, n)exp − j n(k − 1) (11) noise caused by temperature variation or some other physical
NS
n=1 effects [20]. Finally, whether the current CUT is a target can
where k is the index of range bins in the range domain; for be determined based on the following conditions:
1 ≤ k ≤ N S , N S is the number of range-FFT points. Mean- H0
while, to estimate the velocity information, N S times NC -point Z (q, k) ≷ T (q, k) (15)
H1
Doppler-FFTs across the slow time are performed on S(l, k),
and the qth Doppler-FFT output is denoted by S̃(q, k), where H0 and H1 denote the hypothesis of presence and
as follows: absence of a target in the current CUT, respectively. The
 NC  conventional scheme results in an extremely high computa-
2π
S̃(q, k) = S(l, k)exp − j (l−1)(q − 1) (12) tional complexity because two-stage full-dimensional FFT is
l=1
NC performed and all range-Doppler cells are scanned.

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8001113
Fig. 3. Structures of detection schemes. (a) Conventional scheme. (b) Pro-
posed scheme.
Fig. 4. Schematic of the 1-D CA-CFAR detector.
III. P ROPOSED D ETECTION S CHEME
This section proposes a low-complexity target detection
scheme based on distributed 1-D CA-CFAR detection and ROI
preprocessing for FMCW radar, aiming to decrease the compu-
tational complexity and improve the detection performance in
multitarget environment. As illustrated in Fig. 3, the detection
process of the conventional scheme primarily consists of
analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), 2-D FFT operation, and
2-D CA-CFAR detection; the detection using the proposed
scheme is accomplished by the following three main steps.
A. Range ROI Detection
As the first main step, in the same manner, L times
N S -point range-FFTs across the fast time are performed for
range estimation. Some and even the most range bins represent
background noise in multitarget circumstance [26]. In order to
determine the valid range bins that represent valid targets, the
l1 th range-profile sequence Sl1 (k) is chosen to be executed
the first 1-D CA-CFAR detection. Fig. 4 shows the schematic
of the 1-D CA-CFAR detector. The 1-D CA-CFAR detector
uses a linear reference window to estimate the local noise
level and determine the valid range bins. Similarly, the l1 th
range-profile sequence is executed the square-law operation,
i.e., Z (k) = |Sl1 (k)|2 =|S(l1 , k)|2 , l1 ∈ l. Then, the valid range
bins, i.e., range ROI cells, can be determined via
H0
Z (k) ≷ T (k)
H1
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
−1/N
with
 Nr1 the detection threshold T(k) =(Pfa r1 −
1) nr1 =1 Z (nr1 ), with Nr1 denoting the number of reference
cells in the linear reference window, and Z (nr1 ) representing
the power of each reference cell.
The range ROI processing is accomplished as soon as all
range ROI cells are determined. Consequently, the super-
position of determined range ROI cells in all range-profile
sequences can be described as S(l, kn u ) for 1 ≤ n u ≤ Nu ,
where kn u and Nu are the index of the range bins corresponding
to range ROI cells and the number of detected targets in range
domain, respectively.
B. Doppler ROI Detection
As the second main step, Nu times NC -point Doppler-FFTs
across the slow time are performed on the range ROI detection
results S(l, kn u ) for velocity estimation. The operation times of
NC -point Doppler-FFT are decreased from N S to N u for Nu 
N S . Meanwhile, the qth Doppler-FFT output for S(l, kn u ) is
denoted by S̃(q, kn u ), for k1 ≤kn u ≤ k Nu , and is expressed as

NC 
2π
S̃(q, kn u ) = S(l,kn u )exp − j (l − 1)(q − 1) . (17)
l=1
NC
The RDM based on range ROI cells is obtained, as follows:
⎡ ⎤
S̃(1,k1 ) S̃(2,k1 ) · · · S̃(NC ,k1 )
⎢ S̃(1,k2 ) S̃(2,k2 ) · · · S̃(NC ,k2 ) ⎥
⎢ ⎥
RDMROI = ⎢ .. .. .. .. ⎥. (18)
⎣ . . . . ⎦
S̃(1,k Nu ) S̃(2,k Nu ) ··· S̃(NC , k Nu )
It is possible that multiple targets exist at the same range bin
with different velocities. Thus, to extract the effective Doppler
bins corresponding to the targets with various velocities, i.e.,
Doppler ROI cells, the 1-D CA-CFAR detection is executed
for the second time (the second 1-D CA-CFAR detection).
In the same manner, the 1-D CA-CFAR detector is employed
on all range-Doppler cells in RDMROI along the Doppler
domain. After Doppler ROI detection, the effective Doppler
bins, the so-called Doppler ROI cells, at the kn u th range bin
are expressed as S̃(qm p , kn u ) for 1≤m p ≤M p , with M p denoting
the number of the effective Doppler bins at the kn u th range bin
and qm p denoting the index of effective Doppler bins at the
kn u th range bin. In reality, the number of effective Doppler
bins is not necessarily the same at various rang bins, i.e., M p
is a function of kn u as M p = F(kn u ). Thus, the total number
of Doppler ROI cells produced by Doppler ROI detection can
be denoted by N P , i.e., N P = nNuu=1 F(kn u ).
C. Pretargets Estimation and Peak Focus Detection
The second 1-D CA-CFAR detection only employs the
features of targets in Doppler domain. To fully utilize the
characteristics of targets in both range and Doppler domains
to obtain better detection performance, the 1-D CA-CFAR
detection is performed for the third time (the third 1-D
CA-CFAR detection) in range domain on the Doppler ROI
(16)
cells. Above all, the partial DFT operation in Doppler domain
ZHENG et al.: TARGET DETECTION SCHEME WITH DECREASED COMPLEXITY AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE 8001113

is carried out on the reference cells around the Doppler ROI

cells S̃(qm p , kn u ) [27], as follows:
 NC 
2π
S̃(qm p , kr ) = S(l,kr )exp − j (l − 1)(qm p − 1) (19)
l=1
NC
with kn u − (Nr1 + Ng1 + 2/2) ≤ kr ≤kn u +
(Nr1 + Ng1 + 2)/(2), q1 ≤ qm p ≤ q M p , where kr is the
index of the reference cells in range domain, Nr1 is the
number of reference cells, and Ng1 is the number of guard
cells. The total times of the partial DFT operation is denoted
by N D , then N D = N P Nr1 . The results of the third 1-D
CA-CFAR detection performing on the Doppler ROI cells, the
so-called pretargets, are expressed as S̃(q p , k p ) for q p ∈ qm p
and k p ∈ kn u , with (q p , k p ) representing the coordinates of
determined pretargets.
To further improve the detection accuracy of valid targets
while avoiding the detection of ghost targets, the peak focus
algorithm is executed for the detected pretargets, as follows:
2 H0 2
| S̃(qm p ,kr )| ≷ max{| S̃(i, j )| } (20)
H1
2
where qm p −1 ≤ i ≤q m p +1 and kr −1 ≤ j ≤kr +1, | S̃(qm p , kr )| Fig. 5. Architectures of the reference window for the conventional three
2
is the power of pretargets, and | S̃(i, j )| is the power of schemes. (a) Rectangle window. (b) Cross window. (c) Circular window.
range-Doppler cells around a pretarget. The proposed scheme
finishes detection when all pretargets have been performed
with the peak focus algorithm and determine valid targets. The proposed scheme executes L times N S -point range-FFT
operations, Nu times NC -point Doppler-FFT operations, Nr N p
IV. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION times NC -point partial DFT operations, and three times 1-D
In this section, performance of the proposed scheme is CA-CFAR detection. The total number of multiplications and
evaluated and compared with conventional ones through sim- that of additions are, respectively, expressed as
ulation analysis. The three conventional schemes chosen here NS NC
are all based on 2-D FFT and 2-D CA-CFAR algorithms, C M2 = L log2 N S +2N S +Nu log2 NC +2Nu NC
2 2
differing only in the reference window: a 2-D cross refer- +Nr N p NC + Nr N p gr N p
ence window [18], a 2-D circular reference window [20], C A2 = L N S log2 N S +N S (Nr −1)rNu NC log2 NC
and a 2-D rectangle reference window [17], respectively.
They, respectively, are named “FFT plus cross scheme,” “FFT +Nu NC (Nr −1)+Nr N p (NC −1)+N p (Nr −1). (22)
plus circular scheme,” and “FFT plus rectangle scheme” In (21), Nr is the only parameter that may slightly vary
for convenience. The architectures of the reference win- among the three schemes. Without losing generality, the FFT
dows for the three conventional schemes are severally shown plus cross scheme is selected as the representative of the three
in Fig. 5(a)–(c). conventional schemes and used for computational complexity
comparison. The comparison is made based on the settings of
A. Computational Complexity Analysis L = 128, N S = 1024, N P = 35, and Nr = 28.
In this work, the required number of multiplications and Fig. 6 shows the comparison results between the proposed
additions is used as the metrics to analyze the computational scheme and the FFT plus cross scheme when fixing Nu = 15,
complexity. The three conventional schemes have consis- with the y-axis representing the number of multiplication C M
tent expression of complexity since they conduct the same and the number of addition C A defined in (21) and (22), and
operation procedure. Each conventional scheme executes L C M + C A . The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme
times N S -point range-FFT operations and N S times NC -point has lower computational complexity than the conventional
Doppler-FFT operations for obtaining the 2-D RDM. Mean- ones, and the advantage could be enhanced by increasing NC .
while, the 2-D CA-CFAR detection, in which the number of Fig. 7 shows the comparison results between the two
reference cells is Nr , is employed to scan all range-Doppler schemes under various Nu /Ns . The gap of computational
cells. Thus, the required number of multiplications and addi- complexity between the proposed scheme and the conventional
tions, denoted by C M1 and C A1 , respectively, is calculated as one varies significantly according to the ratio of Nu /Ns .
follows: The proposed scheme obtains significant advantage over the
NS NC conventional one when the ratio of Nu /Ns is small, which
C M1 = L log2 N S +N S log2 NC +2N S NC is the most common case in reality. The advantage decreases
2 2
C A1 = L N S log2 N S +N S NC log2 NC + N S NC (Nr −1). (21) fast with the increase of the ratio of Nu /Ns ; when the ratio

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8001113
Fig. 6. Comparison of computational complexity under the fixed Nu = 15.
Fig. 7. Comparison of computational complexity under various Nu /Ns .
approaches to one, the proposed scheme lose the advantage
and obtains a slightly higher computational complexity than
the conventional one. The three crossing points are also
marked in Fig. 7.
B. Noise Estimation Accuracy Analysis
In this section, the noise estimation accuracy is analyzed
and discussed for the 1-D CA-CFAR detector and the three
2-D CA-CFAR detectors defined in Fig. 5.
The normalized average decision threshold (ADT) [28], [29]
is defined and applied to evaluate the noise estimation accuracy
and detection performance of CA-CFAR detectors, shown as
E{T }
ADT = (23)
μ
where {E T } = αC A · μ̄ is the estimated decision threshold,
αC A is the threshold factor, μ̄ is the estimated noise power
value, and μ is the true noise level.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
Fig. 8. Comparison of the normalized ADT among the 1-D CA-CFAR
detector and the three 2-D CA-CFAR detectors.
Fig. 8 demonstrates the comparison results of the nor-
malized ADT among the 1-D CA-CFAR detector and the
three 2-D CA-CFAR detectors in terms of the noise estima-
tion accuracy, based on the same settings of the number of
reference cells Nr = 14, the number of guard cells Ng = 4
in both range and Doppler dimensions, and the false alarm
probability Pfa = 10−6 . The 1-D CA-CFAR detection has two
choices of performing the noise estimation in range dimension
and in Doppler dimension. By increasing SNR, the impact of
the extended target power to the noise estimation accuracy
becomes more severe, which has resulted in the increased
ADT. Based on the same number of reference cells, the 1-D
CA-CFAR detector in range dimension achieves the lowest
(the best) ADT, while the 1-D CA-CFAR detector in Doppler
dimension achieves the largest (the worst) ADT, among the
all five detectors. In particular, the advantage obtained by
the 1-D CA-CFAR detector in range dimension over the
three 2-D CA-CFAR detectors is more significant than the
gap between the three 2-D CA-CFAR detectors and the 1-D
CA-CFAR detector in Doppler dimension. The comparison
results indicate that the target power extended in Doppler
dimension has degraded the noise estimation accuracy.
The proposed detection scheme in this work is based on
the distributed 1-D CA-CFAR and ROI preprocessing. The
procedure is mainly accomplished by performing the following
1-D CA-CFAR detections for three times: 1) range ROI
detection: the first 1-D CA-CFAR detection is performed in
range dimension to extract the range-ROI cells; 2) Doppler
ROI detection: the second 1-D CA-CFAR detection is per-
formed in Doppler dimension to obtain Doppler-ROI cells; and
3) pretargets estimation: the third 1-D CA-CFAR detection
is performed in range dimension to extract the pretarget
cells. The detection performance of the proposed scheme is
resulted from the whole procedure consists of the above three
operations, and could not be directly derived from the noise
estimation accuracy of the 1-D CA-CFAR detection either
in range dimension or in Doppler dimension. Accordingly,
ZHENG et al.: TARGET DETECTION SCHEME WITH DECREASED COMPLEXITY AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
Fig. 9. Simulation results: detection probability versus SNR when
Pfa = 10−6 .
the detection performance should be evaluated in terms of
detection probability Pd [30].
C. Detection Probability Analysis
The detection probability Pd is another indicator to evaluate
the detection performance. The detection scene and parame-
ters are set as follows. In a homogeneous multitarget scene,
16 Swerling I targets [31] are randomly distributed in a 2-D
RDM with 1024 × 1024 size, which contains a Rayleigh
distributed interference background with an average power
of 30 dB; impact of the multitarget shadowing effect produced
by the randomly distributed 16 targets on the detection perfor-
mance will be investigated in the simulation. The numbers of
reference cells are set to 28, 28, 28, and 26 for the proposed
scheme, FFT plus cross scheme, FFT plus circular scheme,
and FFT plus rectangle scheme, respectively. At the same
time, Monte Carlo simulations are repeated for 1000 times
to obtain the detection probability curve under the condition
of the desired false alarm probability Pfa = 10−6 , as illustrated
in Fig. 9, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve
at the SNR = 10 dB, as demonstrated in Fig. 10.
In Fig. 9, the proposed scheme has a higher detection
probability than the three conventional ones. The detection
probability of proposed scheme reaches 100% at SNR =
13 dB, while detection probabilities of the three conven-
tional ones reach 100% at SNR > 20 dB. Considering that
the detection performance is achieved for the scenario with
16 targets, the simulation results suggest that the multitarget
shadowing effect is mitigated through applying the distributed
1-D CA-CFAR detection for three times in the proposed
scheme.
The results in Fig. 10 demonstrate that the proposed scheme
obtains better detection performance over the conventional
ones within the investigated range of false alarm probability.
The comparison results are consistent with that in Fig. 9 for
the all four schemes.
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8001113
Fig. 10. Simulation results: the ROC curve at SNR = 10 dB.
D. CFAR Loss Analysis
The CFAR loss describes the difference of SNR to reach the
same detection probability for a specific false alarm probabil-
ity, between a CFAR detector and the ideal Neyman–Pearson
detector [32]. The required SNR to achieve a target detection
probability Pd for the given false alarm probability Pfa is
denoted by
(Pd /Pfa )1/Nr −1
SNR = 1/Nr
. (24)
1 − Pd
Accordingly, the ideal SNR can be described as
ln(Pfa /Pd )
SNRideal = lim SNR= . (25)
n→∞ ln(Pd )
Thus, the CFAR loss is expressed as [20]
CFARLoss = SNR/SNRideal
(Pd /Pfa )1/N −1 ln(Pfa /Pd )
= / . (26)
1−Pd
1/N ln(Pd )
Fig. 11 produces the CFAR loss curves by setting the
target detection probability Pd to 0.9 and varying the alarm
false probability Pfa from 10−6 to 10−1 . According to the
results, the CFAR loss is inversely proportional to the false
alarm probability for all the four schemes; moreover, the pro-
posed scheme achieves the lowest CFAR loss among the four
schemes and decreases the CFAR loss by 43.1% compared
with the FFT plus circular scheme, which shows the best
CFAR loss among the three conventional ones, when the
false alarm probability is set to 10−5 . According to (25),
the performance of CFAR loss is negatively correlated with
the number of reference cells. The FFT plus rectangle scheme
achieves the highest CFAR loss due to that it has the smallest
number of reference cells. In contrast, the proposed scheme
performs the distributed 1-D CA-CFAR detection for three
times and, as a result, obtains
√ an equivalent number of
reference cells equals to 28 2 3, which is the largest among the
four schemes. Interestingly, the FFT plus circular scheme and
8001113
Fig. 11. CFAR loss against the false alarm probability.
TABLE I
S UMMARY OF D ETECTION R ESULTS FOR M ULTITARGET S CENARIO
the FFT plus cross scheme have the same number of reference
cells and thus, they achieve the completely same CFAR loss
performance.
E. Figure of Merit Analysis
The figure of merit (FoM) parameter describes the ability
to detect valid targets and suppress ghost targets in multitarget
environments. It can be denoted by
Nd −Nd f
figure of merit =
Na + Nd f
where Nd , Nd f , and Na represent the number of detected valid
targets, detected ghost targets, and actual targets, respectively.
The number of missing actual targets is Nma , i.e., Nma = N a −
Nd + Nd f .
To simulate the performance of FoM for the four schemes in
multitarget environment, we design the multitarget simulation
scene: 60 targets are randomly distributed in a 1024 ×
1024 RDM with an average background noise power of 30 dB;
meanwhile, the SNR of each target is randomly set from 5 to
25 dB and the false alarm probability Pfa is set to 10−5 .
The detected targets and their distribution are demonstrated
in Fig. 12. Based on the results in Fig. 12, statistical analysis
is performed and the results are summarized in Table I.
The proposed scheme exhibits the highest value of FoM
among the four schemes. In multitarget environment, some
targets might locate in the reference cells of some other valid
targets, which then results in increased estimated noise power
around the valid targets and degraded detection accuracy of
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
Fig. 12. Simulation results of detecting multitarget distributed in a certain
area.
these valid targets. The probability of targets existence in
the 1-D reference cells is much lower than that in 2-D ref-
erence cells. Meanwhile, multiple distributed 1-D CA-CFAR
detections decrease the detection probability of ghost targets,
and ROI-based processing improves the detection accuracy
of actual targets. In Table I, the results also verify that the
proposed scheme improves the performance of FoM by 14%
compared with the FFT plus circular scheme.
F. Influence of Realistic Factors to Detection Performance
In this section, influence of antenna beam, multipath, and
ground clutter to the detection performance are investigated.
The antenna beamwidth/directivity significantly influences
the transmitter gain and receiver gain. As a result, it has
obvious influence to the energy of a radar echo signal reflected
by a target and could, therefore, cause varying signal-to-clutter
ratio (SCR). The varying SCR is then used to represent the
varying antenna beamwidth/directivity here.
(27)
The ground clutter distribution resembles to the Weibull
distribution [33], which can be modeled as
a  x a−1   x a 
p(x) = exp − (28)
b b b
where b is the scale parameter (b > 0), a is the shape
parameter (a > 0) and indicates the degree of skewness, and
x is the random clutter variable of the Weibull distribution.
The SCR is defined as E/C0 , where E represents the total
average energy of radar echo reflected by a target, and the
clutter power C0 under Weibull distribution is given by
x m2 (1 + (2/a))
C0 = (29)
(ln (2))2/a
where x m is the median of Weibull distribution [34].
By setting the number of reference cells Nr = 10, the
number of guard cells Ng = 6, and the desired Pfa = 10−3 ,
Fig. 13 indicates how the detection probability Pd varies
according to the SCR with the combination of shape and
scale parameters. Pd degrades with the increase of a and b,
ZHENG et al.: TARGET DETECTION SCHEME WITH DECREASED COMPLEXITY AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE 8001113

Fig. 13. Detection probability versus SCR under various ground clutter.

Fig. 15. Recently developed 77-GHz FMCW radar system. (a) Block diagram
of system structure. (b) Photograph of the radar system.

Fig. 14. False alarm probability versus SCR under various multipath
influence.

which represents more severe ground clutter; meanwhile, Pd

improves with the increase of SCR, which suggests better
design and setting of the antenna beamwidth/directivity.
The multipath effect could produce ghost targets [35]. The
influence of multipath on the false alarm probability of the
proposed scheme is then investigated. The results in Fig. 14 are
obtained based on the settings of a = 1 and b = 1 for the
ground clutter, Nr = 10 and Ng = 6. The results demonstrate
that the multipath effect could increase the false alarm prob-
ability, and the influence is more obvious in high SNR level.

V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
To further verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme
in multitarget environment, experiments are carried out using
our newly developed FMCW radar system. Fig. 16. Images of various modules. (a) Transceiver front-end module.
(b) Data acquisition module. (c) GUI implemented in LabVIEW.

A. Experimental Setup of system structure and photograph of the radar system

This section briefly describes the architecture of the newly are presented in Fig. 15(a) and (b), respectively. Mean-
designed 77-GHz FMCW radar prototype. The block diagram while, Fig. 16 shows the images of various modules of the

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8001113 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

Fig. 17. Configuration of the experimental scenario.

TABLE II
C ONFIGURATION OF THE R ADAR S YSTEM PARAMETERS

Fig. 18. Experimental results with N S = 256 and NC = 32. (a) Proposed
scheme. (b) FFT plus cross scheme. (c) FFT plus circular scheme. (d) FFT
plus rectangle scheme.

radar system. The radar system is composed of a 77-GHz

transceiver front-end module with antennas, a real-time data
acquisition module, and an uplink module (Host PC).
In Fig. 16(a), four silicon-integrated millimeter-wave
chips [36], containing the complete transmitter and receiver
chains, as well as the antenna array are mounted on the trans-
ceiver front-end module. The antenna array is a uniform linear
array (ULA) and consists of nine transmitter antennas (TXs)
and 16 receiver antennas (RXs). The integrated transmitter
chain generates the required FMCW chirp signal with 4-GHz
bandwidth, ranging from 77 to 81 GHz. In receiver chain,
the received signals are mixed with the transmitted chirp signal
and then passed through the low-pass filter (LPF) to produce
the beat signals, followed by the ADC with sampling rate Fig. 19. Experimental results with N S = 512 and NC = 64. (a) Proposed
of 37.5 Million Samples per Second (MSPS) for up to 15-MHz scheme. (b) FFT plus cross scheme. (c) FFT plus circular scheme. (d) FFT
intermediate frequency (IF) bandwidth [37]. The receiver noise plus rectangle scheme.
figure is 15 dB, and the transmitter power is 12 dBm [36].
In Fig. 16(b), the data acquisition module is implemented
15.5 and 19 m away from the radar sensor, respectively;
in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device, which is
three metal balls are used to design the multitarget scene: one
primarily responsible for capturing the sampling data from
(object #2) is placed 5.3 m away from the radar sensor with
transceiver front-end module and transfer the logged data
the radial velocity 0.8 m/s, and the other two stationary balls
to PC. Fig. 16(c) then shows the software designed and
(objects #1 and #3) are placed 1.8 and 3.5 m away from the
implemented in LabView, which realizes the functions of
radar sensor, respectively.
receiving data packets in real time and performing high-level
algorithms on the PC.
Fig. 17 shows the designed experimental scenario for carry- B. Experimental Analysis
ing out the experiment. The configuration parameters are pre- Figs. 18 and 19 show the detection results of the all
sented in Table II. In Fig. 17, a fixed iron lamppost (object #4) four schemes, in the case of {N S = 256 and NC = 32} and
and a fixed iron box (object #5) are located approximately {N S = 512 and NC = 64}, respectively.

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ZHENG et al.: TARGET DETECTION SCHEME WITH DECREASED COMPLEXITY AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
TABLE III
S TATISTICAL A NALYSIS OF F O M P ERFORMANCE
Fig. 20. Computational complexity based on two metrics. (a) Number of
multiplications (normalized). (b) Number of additions (normalized).
As shown in Fig. 18, the all four schemes successfully detect
the parameters of five valid targets, which, respectively, are
(1.7589 m, 0 m/s), (3.5177 m, 0 m/s), (5.2766 m, 0.7813 m/s),
(15.4390 m, 0 m/s), and (19.1521 m, 0 m/s). Using the
proposed scheme, the results of range ROI detection and
Doppler ROI detection are Nu = 7 and N P = 12, respectively.
According to the comparison results in Fig. 18(a)–(d), the
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8001113
proposed scheme suffers decreased detections of ghost targets
than the three conventional schemes. As a result, the proposed
scheme reaches the best FoM performance among the all four
schemes and increases the FoM parameters by 33.33% over
the FFT plus cross scheme, which obtains the highest FoM
among the three conventional ones.
According to the results in Fig. 19, using the proposed
scheme, the number of range ROI cells and that of Doppler
ROI cells are Nu = 10 and N P = 30, respectively. The proposed
scheme maintains the advantage with smaller detection number
of ghost targets over the three conventional ones; and thanks
to the zero detection of ghost targets, it achieves 100% for the
FoM. By comparing the results in Fig. 19 with that in Fig. 18,
we notice that with Nu and N P being increased, the detection
number of ghost targets is decreased. Consequently, the FoM
performance in Table III is improved.
Based on the above detection results in experiment, the com-
putational complexity is evaluated in terms of number of
multiplication and that of addition defined in (21) and (22),
for the all four schemes, and the results are summarized
in Fig. 20. The comparison results between Case A and
Case B in either of Fig. 20(a) or (b) show that, with the
number of range-FFT points and Doppler-FFT points being
increased, the computational complexities arise for the all four
schemes. As compared with the three conventional schemes,
the proposed scheme decreases the number of multiplications
by 42.78% and 55.68%, respectively, in Case A and Case B,
and the number of additions by 63.26% and 74.92% in
Case A and Case B, respectively. The comparison results
verify that the proposed scheme significantly decreases the
computational complexity, and the advantage will be further
enhanced with the increase of range-FFT and Doppler-FFT
points. We also notice that in Fig. 20(b), the addition number
of FFT plus rectangle scheme is slightly lower than the other
two conventional ones. The slight gap is caused owing to that
the FFT plus rectangle scheme has slightly smaller number of
reference cells than the other two conventional ones.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this article, a novel target detection scheme based on
distributed 1-D CA-CFAR and ROI preprocessing is proposed
for the FMCW radar to decrease computational complexity
while maintaining robust performance in multitarget detec-
tions. By conducting the 1-D CA-CFAR detection for three
times, the proposed scheme fully utilizes the characteristics
of valid targets in both range domain and Doppler domain
in the target detection; in addition, by conducting range and
Doppler ROI detection, it performs Doppler-FFT operations
only on the range ROI cells and scans only Doppler ROI
cells to extract pretargets. As a result, the proposed scheme
significantly decreases the computational complexity while
simultaneously enhancing the detection performance in the
multitarget environment, as compared with the conventional
schemes. Simulations and field tests are carried out and the
both results verify the advantages of the proposed scheme
over the conventional ones, in terms of both the computational
complexity and detection performance.
8001113 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
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2017.
Qiangwen Zheng was born in Anhui, China,
in 1994. He received the B.S. degree in microelec-
tronics science and engineering from Anhui Univer-
sity, Hefei, China, in 2017. He is currently pursuing
the M.S. degree in marine electronic information
engineering with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou,
China.
His research interests include millimeter-wave
radar system and its signal processing.
Lijie Yang was born in Zhejiang, China, in 1991. He
received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic and
information engineering from Zhejiang University,
Hangzhou, China, in 2013 and 2019, respectively.
He is currently an Assistant Researcher with the
Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou. His current research inter-
ests include the design of high-resolution 4-D imag-
ing radar, classification and tracking algorithm for
traffic participants, and multisensor fusion algorithm
for ADAS.
ZHENG et al.: TARGET DETECTION SCHEME WITH DECREASED COMPLEXITY AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
Yaping Xie was born in Henan, China, in 1993.
He received the B.S. degree in electronic and infor-
mation engineering from the Henan University of
Technology, Zhengzhou, China, in 2012 and 2016,
respectively. He is currently pursuing the M.S.
degree with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
His main interest is millimeter-wave radar systems.
Junjie Li was born in Guangdong, China, in 1993.
He received the B.S. degree in naval architecture and
marine engineering from Dalian Maritime Univer-
sity, Dalian, China, in 2016. He is currently pursuing
the Ph.D. degree in marine information science and
engineering with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou,
China.
His research interests include passive radar and
millimeter-wave radar signal processing.
Tang Hu was born in Zhejiang, China, in 1979.
He received the B.S. degree in measurement and
control technology and instruments from Yanshan
University, Qinhuangdao, China, in 2002, and the
M.S. degree from the Nanjing University of Aero-
nautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China, in 2005.
He is currently a Senior Engineer with the Zhe-
jiang Lab, Hangzhou, China. His research interest
includes millimeter-wave radar chip and system.
Jiang Zhu (Member, IEEE) received the B.E. degree
in electronic science and technology from Harbin
Engineering University, Harbin, China, in 2011, and
the Ph.D. degree in information and communica-
tion engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing,
China, in 2016.
He was a Lecturer with the Ocean College,
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. His current
research interests include statistical signal process-
ing, Bayesian methods, and unlabeled sensing.
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Chunyi Song (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D.
degree in electronic and communication engineering
from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2009.
He was a Research Associate with Waseda Univer-
sity, from 2007 to 2009. He was a Researcher with
the National Institute of Information and Commu-
nications Technology (NICT), Koganei, Japan, from
2009 to 2013, and as a Senior Researcher, in 2014.
Since 2014, he has been with Zhejiang University,
Hangzhou, China, as an Associate Professor, where
he is also serving as the Vice Director of the
Engineering Research Center of Oceanic Sensing Technology and Equipment,
Ministry of Education.
Dr. Song was elected to the Distinguished Expert, Zhejiang, in 2016, and a
Core Member of the Leading Innovative Team, Zhejiang, in 2018.
Zhiwei Xu (Senior Member, IEEE) received the
Ph.D. degree in integrated circuits and systems from
the University of California at Los Angeles, Los
Angeles, CA, USA, in 2003.
He held senior manager positions with G-Plus Inc.,
Los Angeles, SST Communications, Los Angeles,
Conexant Systems, Irvine, CA, USA, and NXP Inc.,
San Diego, CA, USA, before he joined the HRL
Laboratories, Los Angeles, where he led develop-
ment for wireless LAN and SoC solutions for propri-
etary wireless multimedia systems, CMOS cellular
transceiver, multimedia over cable (MoCA) system, and TV tuners. He is
currently a Professor with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, with a
focus on cognitive radios, high-speed analog-to-digital conversion (ADC),
and mmWave ICs. He has authored or co-authored 70 publications, one
contribution to the encyclopedia of wireless and mobile communications, ten
granted patents, and around 20 pending ones.
Dr. Xu was elected to the Distinguished Expert, China, in 2014, and the
Team Leader of the Leading Innovative Team, Zhejiang, in 2018. He serves the
technical program committee for international workshop on millimeter-wave
communications: from circuit to network and as a Series Editor for IEEE
Communications Magazine.