The feasibility of classifying different human activities based on micro-Doppler signatures is investigated. Measured data of 12 human subjects performing seven different activities are collected using a Doppler radar. The seven activities include running, walking, walking while holding a stick, crawling, boxing while moving forward, boxing while standing in place, and sitting still. Six features are extracted from the Doppler spectrogram. A support vector machine (SVM) is then trained using the measurement features to classify the activities. A multiclass classification is implemented using a decision-tree structure. Optimal parameters for the SVM are found through a fourfold cross-validation. The resulting classification accuracy is found to be more than 90%. The potentials of classifying human activities over extended time duration, through wall, and at oblique angles with respect to the radar are also investigated and discussed.

Human Activity Classification Based on Micro-Doppler Signatures Using a Support Vector Machine

In this paper, a new version of the quadrature Kalman filter (QKF) is developed theoretically and tested experimentally. We first derive the new QKF for nonlinear systems with additive Gaussian noise by linearizing the process and measurement functions using statistical linear regression (SLR) through a set of Gauss-Hermite quadrature points that parameterize the Gaussian density. Moreover, we discuss how the new QKF can be extended and modified to take into account specific details of a given application. We then go on to extend the use of the new QKF to discrete-time, nonlinear systems with additive, possibly non-Gaussian noise. A bank of parallel QKFs, called the Gaussian sum-quadrature Kalman filter (GS-QKF) approximates the predicted and posterior densities as a finite number of weighted sums of Gaussian densities. The weights are obtained from the residuals of the QKFs. Three different Gaussian mixture reduction techniques are presented to alleviate the growing number of the Gaussian sum terms inherent to the GS-QKFs. Simulation results exhibit a significant improvement of the GS-QKFs over other nonlinear filtering approaches, namely, the basic bootstrap (particle) filters and Gaussian-sum extended Kalman filters, to solve nonlinear non- Gaussian filtering problems.

http://soma.mcmaster.ca/papers/Paper_2.pdf

Discrete-Time Nonlinear Filtering Algorithms Using Gauss–Hermite Quadrature

This is a book review of 'The Micro-Doppler Effect in Radar' by V. C. Chen. Artech House, 16 Sussex Street, London, SW1V 4RW, UK. 2011. 290pp + diskette. Illustrated. £90. ISBN 978-1-60807-057-2.

'The Micro-Doppler Effect in Radar' by V.C. Chen

Several problems arising in electromagnetics can be directly formulated or suitably recast for an effective solution within the compressive sensing (CS) framework. This has motivated a great interest in developing and applying CS methodologies to several conventional and innovative electromagnetic scenarios. This work is aimed at presenting, to the best of the authors knowledge, a review of the state-of-the-art and most recent advances of CS formulations and related methods as applied to electromagnetics. Toward this end, a wide set of applicative scenarios comprising the diagnosis and synthesis of antenna arrays, the estimation of directions of arrival, and the solution of inverse scattering and radar imaging problems are reviewed. Current challenges and trends in the application of CS to the solution of traditional and new electromagnetic problems are also discussed.

Compressive Sensing in Electromagnetics - A Review

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on environment perception for intelligent vehicles. The state-of-the-art algorithms and modeling methods for intelligent vehicles are given, with a summary of their pros and cons. A special attention is paid to methods for lane and road detection, traffic sign recognition, vehicle tracking, behavior analysis, and scene understanding. In addition, we provide information about datasets, common performance analysis, and perspectives on future research directions in this area.

/pdf/overview-of-environment-perception-for-intelligent-vehicles-7s8l9oth23.pdf

Overview of Environment Perception for Intelligent Vehicles

Automotive radar is the most promising and fastest-growing civilian application of radar technology. Vehicular radars provide the key enabling technology for the autonomous driving revolution that will have a dramatic impact on everyone's day-to-day lives. They play a central role in the autonomous sensing suit because of the significant progress in the radio-frequency (RF) CMOS technology that enables high-level radaron-chip integration and thus reduces the automotive radar cost to the level of consumer mass production. However, this would not be sufficient without high spatial resolution performance, which can be obtained by multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) and cognitive approaches at a lower cost.

The Rise of Radar for Autonomous Vehicles: Signal processing solutions and future research directions

An automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithm, based on greedy learning of Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is developed. The GMMs were obtained for a wide range of ground surveillance radar targets such as walking person(s), tracked or wheeled vehicles, animals, and clutter. Maximum-likelihood (ML) and majority-voting decision schemes were applied to these models for target classification. The corresponding classifiers were trained and tested using distinct databases of target echoes, recorded by ground surveillance radar. ML and majority-voting classifiers obtained classification rates of 88% and 96%, correspondingly. Both classifiers outperform trained human operators.

GMM-based target classification for ground surveillance Doppler radar

The problem of maneuvering target tracking in the presence of glint noise is addressed in this work. The main challenge in this problem stems from its nonlinearity and non-Gaussianity. A new estimator, named as nonlinear Gaussian mixture Kalman filter (NL-GMKF) is derived based on the minimum-mean-square error (MMSE) criterion and applied to the problem of maneuvering target tracking in the presence of glint. The tracking performance of the NL-GMKF is evaluated and compared with the interacting multiple modeling (IMM) implemented with extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), particle filter (PF) and the Gaussian sum PF (GSPF). It is shown that the NL-GMKF outperforms these algorithms in several examples with maneuvering target and/or glint noise measurements.

Maneuvering Target Tracking in the Presence of Glint using the Nonlinear Gaussian Mixture Kalman Filter

A high azimuth and elevation resolution multiple-input-multiple-output(MIMO) radar prototype with 16 Tx and 16 Rx antenna elements was developed in this work to address the autonomous driving vehicle challenges in complex urban environments. This article describes the technological scope of the developed prototype, details the performance challenges and discusses the system design considerations. The main goal of the developed automotive radar prototype is to achieve a high 2D angular resolution in the presence of a large number of radar echoes while maintaining an industry acceptable antenna aperture size and reasonable cost.

Automotive MIMO radar for urban environments

This work addresses the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple sources using short and dynamic sensor arrays. We propose to utilize compressive sensing (CS) theory to reconstruct the high-resolution spatial spectrum from a small number of spatial measurements. Motivated by the physical structure of the spatial spectrum, we model it as a sparse signal in the wavenumber-frequency domain, where the array manifold is proposed to serve as a deterministic sensing matrix. The proposed spatial CS (SCS) approach allows exploitation of the array orientation diversity (achievable via array dynamics) in the CS framework to address challenging array signal processing problems such as left-right ambiguity and poor estimation performance at endfire. The SCS is conceptually different from well-known classical and subspace-based methods because it provides high azimuth resolution using a short dynamic linear array without restricting requirements on the spatial and temporal stationarity and correlation properties of the sources and the noise. The SCS approach was shown to outperform current superresolution and orientation diversity based methods in single-snapshot simulations with multiple sources.

Igal Bilik

Papers

The Rise of Radar for Autonomous Vehicles: Signal processing solutions and future research directions

GMM-based target classification for ground surveillance Doppler radar

Maneuvering Target Tracking in the Presence of Glint using the Nonlinear Gaussian Mixture Kalman Filter

Automotive MIMO radar for urban environments

Spatial Compressive Sensing for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation of Multiple Sources using Dynamic Sensor Arrays