Radar Sensor Signal Acquisition and Multidimensional FFT Processing for Surveillance Applications in Transport Systems

The design and test of a radio detection and ranging (Radar) sensor signal acquisition and processing platform is presented in this paper. The Radar sensor operates in real time and is suited for surveillance applications in transport systems. It includes a front-end with a continuous-wave frequency-modulated transceiver operating in X-band, with a single transmitter and multiple receivers, and a multichannel high-speed A/D converter. Sensor signal processing and data communication tasks with external hosts are managed by a field-programmable gate array. The signal processing chain includes region of interest selection, multidimensional fast Fourier transform, peak detection, alarm decision logic, data calibration, and diagnostic. By configuring the Radar sensing platform in low-power mode (7-dBm transmitted power), it is possible to detect still and moving targets with a covered range up to 300-m and 30-cm resolution. The measuring range can be increased up to 2 km by adding an extra 34.5-dBm power amplifier. The Radar sensing platform can be configured for a maximum detected speed of 200 km/h, with a resolution of 1.56 km/h, or a speed up to 50 km/h with a resolution of 0.4 km/h. The cross-range resolution depends on the number of receiving channels; a tradeoff can be found between cross-range resolution of the Radar sensor and its complexity and power consumption. With respect to the state of the art of surveillance Radar sensors and light detection and ranging, the proposed solution stands for its high configurability and for the better tradeoff that can be found in terms of covered distance and power consumption.