Achieving Efficient and Realistic Full-Radar Simulations and Automatic Data Annotation by Exploiting Ray Meta Data from a Radar Ray Tracing Simulator

In this work, a novel radar simulation concept for efficiently simulating realistic radar data for range, Doppler, and arbitrary antenna positions is introduced. With the concept, the simulated radar signal can also be automatically annotated by splitting it into multiple parts. Annotations that are almost perfect - including the annotation of exotic effects, such as multi-path - can be produced with this approach. Signal parts originating from different parts of an object can be labelled with it as well. To this end, the computation process used in a Monte Carlo shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) simulator is adapted. By considering the hits of each simulated ray, various meta data can be stored, such as hit position, mesh pointer, object IDs, and many more. This collected meta data can then be utilized to predict path-length changes caused by object motion to obtain Doppler information or to apply specific ray filter rules to obtain radar signals that only fulfil specific conditions, such as multiple bounces, or signals that contain specific object IDs. Using this approach, perfect, and otherwise almost impossible, annotation schemes can be realized.