Cost-efficient FMCW radar for multi-target classification in security gate monitoring

A prototype of a radar system for classification of multiple targets passing through a road gate is presented in this paper. It allows to identify different types of targets, i.e., pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, and trucks. The developed system is based on a low-cost 24 GHz off-the-shelf FMCW radar, combined with an embedded Raspberry Pi PC for data acquisition and transmission to a remote processing PC, which take care of detection and classification. The processing chain relies upon a tracking algorithm to follow the targets during traversal, combined with a classification scheme based on support vector machines. The approach has been validated with experimental data acquired in different scenarios, showing good identification capabilities.