1-bit Compressive Radar with Phase Dithering

Dithering techniques, through the addition of a (random) signal before the Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), are widely used in acquisition chain designs for their ability to shape the quantization noise, e.g., to improve the estimation and detection of the sampled signal. In this paper, we stray away from this additive dithering scheme-that often induces a complex and high-cost implementation-and adopt a phase dithering technique applicable to 1-bit quantization of radar signals. Our approach leverages already existing radar architecture of Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars and can be efficiently implemented. We first study theoretically the efficiency of our scheme by linking it to Phase-Only (PO) acquisition, a coarse quantization scheme that only records the signal phase. We then show, through extensive Monte Carlo simulations, that phase dithering is an interesting alternative to the additive random dithering for low-measurement regimes.