This letter proposes a joint discrete Fourier transform (DFT)—estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) estimator for time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) in vehicle frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars. Since the vehicle FMCW radar should recognize vehicles in the side/rear area when the driver initiates a lane change, the estimation of the joint TOA/DOA between the radar and targets is an important issue for solving complicated location tasks. However, conventional joint estimation methods such as 2D-ESPRIT and 2D-multiple signal classification (MUSIC) cannot be adopted for real-time implementation due to their high computational loads. To satisfy the required accuracy specifications and reduce complexity compared with the conventional estimator, we propose a low-complexity joint TOA and DOA estimator that uses the combined DFT-ESPRIT algorithm for FMCW radars. The performance of the proposed estimation in multitarget environments was derived and compared with the Monte Carlo simulation results. The root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the proposed method was compared with that of 2D-ESPRIT with various parameters. To verify the performance of the proposed combination method, we implemented the FMCW radar and verified its performance in an anechoic chamber environment.
Kim et al. (Thu,) studied this question.