Hardware Deployable Radar Spectrum-based CNN classifier for Drone targets

It is well known that AI technology is spreading its application in all technical fields. Among all, radar field may take benefit from AI usage because its ability to recognize the environment by using small amount of domain expertise. Nowadays, the upcoming drone threats are stimulating the radar engineers to seek for advanced solutions for their classification in a congested scenario. As Deep Learning based drone classification has shown its first promising results, still few studies aim at hardware implementation of neural networks trained on frequency-amplitude 1D spectra. In this study, a lightweight CNN is trained on radar collected data prior to be quantized and evaluated on FPGA hardware.