Data-Driven Object Vehicle Estimation by Radar Accuracy Modeling with Weighted Interpolation

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Mar 26;21(7):2317. doi: 10.3390/s21072317.

Abstract

For accurate object vehicle estimation using radar, there are two fundamental problems: measurement uncertainties in calculating an object's position with a virtual polygon box and latency due to commercial radar tracking algorithms. We present a data-driven object vehicle estimation scheme to solve measurement uncertainty and latency problems in radar systems. A radar accuracy model and latency coordination are proposed to reduce the tracking error. We first design data-driven radar accuracy models to improve the accuracy of estimation determined by the object vehicle's position. The proposed model solves the measurement uncertainty problem within a feasible set for error covariance. The latency coordination is developed by analyzing the position error according to the relative velocity. The position error by latency is stored in a feasible set for relative velocity, and the solution is calculated from the given relative velocity. Removing the measurement uncertainty and latency of the radar system allows for a weighted interpolation to be applied to estimate the position of the object vehicle. Our method is tested by a scenario-based estimation experiment to validate the usefulness of the proposed data-driven object vehicle estimation scheme. We confirm that the proposed estimation method produces improved performance over the conventional radar estimation and previous methods.

Keywords: autonomous vehicle; data-driven; object vehicle estimation; radar accuracy; radar latency; weighted interpolation.