Methods for FMCW radar map georeferencing

Abstract In a context of mobile environment mapping, a vehicle-based radar system, K2Pi, has been developed. A mapping of the environment is carried out from the radar datasets. Given the specificities of radar maps, the main problem at this stage is to find a method to georeference these maps. This article proposes three radar map georeferencing methods. The first method is a typical manual selection of a set of control point pairs. The second method consists of matching the relative trajectory computed by a specific radar algorithm with a trajectory recorded from absolute DGPS recording. Finally, the third method, inspired by the image-to-image approach, is based on Fourier-Mellin transform which automatically registers the radar map with respect to a georeferenced aerial photograph. Successfully tested on radar datasets, this method could be applied to many other types of data.