Monitoring road traffic with a high resolution LFMCW radar

Abstract

The current development of the high resolution concept allows to redefine standard applications of radars, like the measurement of the motion parameters of road traffic. High resolution radars may be used to monitor the road traffic. In this paper, live captures from a high resolution linear frequency modulated continuous wave (LFMCW) millimeter-wave radar are shown. For the estimation of the dynamics of the simultaneously illuminated targets, two approaches are described. The first one is a tracking-based technique of the vehicle echoes in the range-Doppler-slow time domain. The second one uses a range bin alignment technique, extracted from the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) world. This second approach works in the range profile domain. Both algorithms give similar results in the estimation of the speed of the vehicles. However, there are some divergences in the estimates of the accelerations. We hope that both algorithms may be useful for the future traffic surveillance systems.