On-the-fly range-velocity radar data compression exploring Doppler spectrum redundancy

Radar systems extracting target range and velocity use sequence of pulses in Pulse-Doppler systems, or sequence of short chirps for Frequency Modulation Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar. In both cases large amount of intermediate data needs to be stored before extracting the velocity information from the Doppler spectrum. An on-the-fly compression scheme is presented here that can reduce the needed storage space. The technique explores the redundancies in the Doppler spectrum. Basic compression architecture is described to take advantage of the nature of the data-generation process. A number of implementation options are proposed and evaluated on simulated and on real data. The proposed method is lossless. Practical “lossy” versions with fixed compression rate are also derived which allow graceful degradation of the performance and are suitable for embedded implementation.