This paper proposes a low-complexity spectral partitioning (SP) based MUSIC algorithm for automotive radar. For short-range radar (SRR), the range accuracy and resolution of 24 GHz ISM band radar should be improved because the requirements of automotive sensing become more demanding over time. To improve the performance of range estimation, high resolution based algorithms such as the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) and multiple signal classification (MUSIC) have been proposed. However, in a low signal-tonoise ratio (SNR), the high resolution algorithm shows degraded performance to estimate the parameters. To solve this problem, SP based high resolution algorithms have been studied recently. However, for real-time operation, the conventional SP method cannot be applied to automotive radar due to its high complexity. Therefore, a low complexity SP based MUSIC is designed to maintain the performance of the range accuracy and resolution in a low SNR environment. While the complexity of the proposed algorithm is less than the SP-MUSIC, Monte-Carlo simulation results and experimental results show that the estimation performance of the proposed method is similar to that of SP-MUSIC in terms of various parameters.
