Safety in driving would be significantly increased with the aid of radar technologies able to provide the driver with information in real time so that he could "see" (and make him "see") the scenario before his car in any weather condition and/or have emergency procedures started automatically by the radar system itself. The radar imaging system for anti-collision, referred to as MIRANDA (Millimeter-wave Imaging Radar in the Near fielD for Anti-collision) which is now being developed at CESPA is based on four transmitters and a planar intelligent receiving cells with their microwave front-ends integrated with a Digital Signal Processor (DSP). Thanks to high speed data links the receiving cells are digitally connected in chain while their millimeter front-ends are coherently synchronized by the local millimeter signal. The reconstruction process of the images of the scenario in front of the moving car takes place, together with the evaluation of their individual speeds, in a distributed manner on the DSP net. This solution requires low complexity millimeter circuits but heavy computation if a conjugate-phase-matched filter is directly implemented. Because of the importance of having real time operations we are working at a new Millimeter imaging Reconstruction Algorithm (MIRA-3D) which must reconstruct the image without aberration in the far field as well as in the near field zones of the array and acquire the radial speeds of the scattering centers. In this paper the multiprocessing implementation of MIRA-3D is described. (A*)
Abstract