Published June 2, 2026 | Version v2

Can Amplitude–phase Imbalance Compensator of CW Doppler Radar Receiver Be Considered Indispensable?

  • 1. ROR icon National University of Defense Technology

Description

In conventional continuous-wave (CW) Doppler radar receivers, the amplitude-phase imbalance (API) compensator has long been deemed mandatory to eliminate inherent radio frequency signal mismatches before Doppler signal demodulation. In this work, we validate that high-accuracy Doppler information can be directly acquired by a well-designed downstream Doppler extractor, even with the complete removal of the upstream API compensator. Two potential hypotheses are verified accordingly: either the receiver system is free of API errors, or the downstream Doppler extractor can act as an alternative solution to suppress API errors autonomously. We develop an end-to-end (E2E) Doppler extractor capable of producing reliable Doppler data under severe API interference without any dedicated compensation modules. Experimental and theoretical results confirm that the proposed extractor inherently realizes built-in API immunity, verifying the second hypothesis. This work draws a critical conclusion that the traditional API compensator is no longer an essential component for CW Doppler radar receiver design.

Notes

The code not only demonstrates the design of the E2E Doppler extractor (Block 5 in the code "e2eDoppler_V3new.m"), but also validates its superior performance through ablation experiments.

Code Update Instructions
We have updated the program code and uploaded the latest version to Zenodo to resolve compatibility issues with different MATLAB versions.
If you have already downloaded the old file e2eDoppler_V3.1.m before, you only need to rename this file to run normally. For example, rename it to e2eDoppler_V3new.m.
Alternatively, you can directly download our newly updated file e2eDoppler_V3new.m from the repository to get the available program.


Update Reason
Some versions of MATLAB do not support running program files that contain the dot symbol (.) in the filename. The version number dot in the original filename e2eDoppler_V3.1.m will cause compatibility errors and prevent the program from running properly on partial MATLAB versions. This update removes the special symbol in the filename to ensure universal compatibility.
No changes have been made to the core algorithm and functional logic of the program, so the calculation accuracy and running performance remain completely consistent with the original version.

 

Files

Files (5.1 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:91b54e635caf475b2bcfa66c30bbd874
7.1 kB Download
md5:0be5623da8b4cc3ae05956f7732177d0
9.5 kB Download
md5:aa3da8447cf06ceb10e1b1cb54563cd7
5.1 MB Download

Additional details

Software

Programming language
MATLAB