Track-conditioned Residual Frequency Estimation For Low-resolution FMCW Radar

Low-resolution FMCW radar normally forms a complete range-Doppler representation before detection and tracking. After association, however, the tracker already predicts the target's next range and radial velocity. We propose track-conditioned residual estimation (TCRE), which removes the predicted moving-target phase before spectral formation, summarizes each 64-sample chirp by four coherent complex sums, and estimates the remaining beat-frequency and Doppler-frequency errors from phase progression. We account for the first-order fast-time and slow-time coupling of a moving target and derive the local phase-unwrapping region and three-receiver local information bound. Four summaries retain 93.77 percent of the zero-residual fast-time information while reducing the retained representation by a factor of 16. In 5,000 matched 60-GHz cluttered simulations, TCRE reduces range RMSE by 32.8 to 46.3 percent and velocity RMSE by 58.6 to 71.0 percent relative to a fully specified same-prior residual ZFFT.