Patent ID: 8779969

Claim:
A radar device comprising: a transceiver that: transmits a radar wave, the radar wave being frequency modulated to have a frequency that increases in an up section over time and decreases in a down section over time, the up and down sections constituting one cycle of the radar wave; and receives, by receiving antennas, arrival echoes that are reflected radar waves; a peak detecting unit that performs spectrum analysis on a beat signal, which is generated by mixing a received signal by each of the receiving antennas with a transmitted signal used for the transmission, in each of the up and down sections to extract frequency components each having a frequency peak as a result of the spectrum analysis; an azimuth estimating unit that: produces, for each of the frequency components during the up section and the frequency components during the down section detected by the peak detecting unit, an autocorrelation matrix of the received signals of the respective antennas; estimates a number of the arrival echoes based on eigenvalues of the autocorrelation matrix; and estimates an arrival azimuth of each of the arrival echoes and arrival power indicative of power of each of the arrival echoes, thus producing azimuth information including these estimated results; a pair matching unit that checks whether the azimuth information for each of the frequency peaks during the up section is matched with the azimuth information for each of the frequency peaks during the down section to thereby generate frequency pairs each comprised of one of the frequency peaks during the up section and one of the frequency peaks during the down section, the frequency pair meeting a predetermined condition; a target information generating unit that: calculates, based on the frequency pairs generated by the pair matching unit, a distance with respect to a target and a relative speed of the target, the target corresponding to each frequency pair and having reflected the radar wave; determines the arrival azimuth of each of the arrival echoes as an azimuth of the target corresponding to each frequency pair; and generates, for each frequency pair, target information including at least: the distance with respect to the target, the relative speed of the target, and the azimuth of the target, wherein the estimating unit comprises a virtual azimuth obtaining unit, when an angular range between the arrival azimuths of adjacent two arrival echoes in the arrival echoes is equal to or smaller than a resolution, the virtual azimuth obtaining unit obtaining a virtual azimuth being within the arrival azimuths of the two arrival echoes, and obtaining virtual power representing arrival power of an arrival echo from the virtual azimuth, the resolution being previously defined based on characteristics of the receiving antennas, the virtual azimuth and the virtual power obtained by the virtual azimuth obtaining unit being included in the azimuth information.