A Radar-Oriented Approach to the Normal Distributions Transform

Abstract

A modification of the scan-matching technique known as the Normal Distributions Transform to be applicable to radar data is presented. The proposed modification uses the measurements of received signal power to account for possible radar cross-section (RCS) fluctuation of the scene, which is prone to cause missed detections, undesirable in scan-matching techniques. It is demonstrated that RCS fluctuations according to a Swerling III model leads to an increase of the pose estimation errors, while the proposed approach reduces the errors to values equivalent to what can be achieved in the abscence of these fluctuations.