Patent ID: 9581681
Date: 2017-02-28
CPC Classifications: G01S

Claim:
1. A method of processing radar signals reflected from one or more objects in a field of view of a radar transmitter transmitting the radar signals, the method comprising: receiving and modulating the radar signals reflected from the one or more objects by a plurality of binary phase shifters to produce a set of modulated signals, the binary phase shifters being controlled by binary coding data; summing the modulated signals and down converting them by a mixer producing in-phase and quadrature output signals which are each sampled and digitized by one or more A/D convertors to produce a set of real and imaginary digital values corresponding to the in-phase and quadrature output signals produced by the mixer during an acquisition of the field of view; distributing real and imaginary digital values corresponding to the in-phase and quadrature output signals produced by the mixer into a number of channels, the number of channels being equal to a number of desired radar beam directions to be processed concurrently and each channel having real and imaginary digital values corresponding to the digitized in-phase and quadrature signals output by the mixer; performing a complex multiplication using the real and imaginary digital values in each channel as one multiplicand and using real and imaginary values of a signal mask as the other multiplicand, the signal mask being different for each channel and for each channel being selected to produce a desired beam with desired characteristics for each channel, each complex multiplication producing a multiplication result which has both real and imaginary parts; and transforming the real and imaginary parts of said multiplication results or of a summation of said multiplication results in said set or matrix using a transformational function which produces transformed data, conceptually as a set or matrix, wherein each position of the set or matrix of the transformed data reflects the scattering strength of an object in said field of view at a corresponding range with a corresponding radial velocity, with each column of the matrix of transformed data representing range bins and each row of the transformed data representing velocity bins.