Patent ID: 7489266

Claim:
A radar system comprising: a plurality of reception antennas which receive incoming waves reflected by an object; a transmission wave generating device which generates transmission waves; a transmission antenna which transmits transmission waves; a mixer which mixes the received waves received by said reception antennas and said transmission waves, and generates beat signals; an A/D converter which converts said beat signals to digital signals; a storage device which stores said digitized beat signals in association with each of the reception antennas; a Fourier transformation device which Fourier transforms said stored beat signals; a digital beam forming device which generates beam signals at predetermined pitch angles based on said Fourier transformed signals; an orientation detecting device which detects an orientation of said object using said generated beam signals; a distance detecting device which detects a distance to said object using said generated beam signals; and a signal separation processing device which performs separation processing of said beat signals based on said detected orientation and distance of the object, using said beat signals associated with each of the reception antennas, which are Fourier transformed by said Fourier transformation device, wherein: said signal separation processing device performs separation processing of a signal using the maximum entropy method; and said signal separation processing device performs separation processing of the signal by using only either one of the real number parts and the imaginary number parts of the signals corresponding to each of the reception antennas, generated by said Fourier transformation device.