Radar-Based Materials Classification Using Deep Wavelet Scattering Transform: A Comparison of Centimeter vs. Millimeter Wave Units

Radar-based materials detection received significant attention in recent years for its potential inclusion in consumer and industrial applications like object recognition for grasping and manufacturing quality assurance and control. Several radar publications were developed for material classification under controlled settings with specific materials’ properties and shapes. Recent literature has challenged the earlier findings on radars-based materials classification claiming that earlier solutions are not easily scaled to industrial applications due to issues such as the analog-to-digital converters’ high sensitivity to target aspect angle, noise fluctuations due to temperature and other external conditions and sensor orientation. Published experiments on the impact of the aforementioned factors on the robustness of the extracted radar-based traditional features have already demonstrated that the application of deep neural networks can mitigate, to some extent, the impact to produce a viable solution. However, previous studies lacked an investigation of the usefulness of lower frequency radar units, specifically
$<10$
GHz, against the higher range units around and above 60 GHz. To address the aforementioned investigation, this research considers two radar units with different frequency ranges: the Walabot-3D (6.3-8 GHz) cm-wave and IMAGEVK-74 (62-69 GHz) mm-wave imaging units by Vayyar Imaging. A comparison is presented on the applicability of each unit for material classification. This work also extends upon previous efforts by applying deep wavelet scattering transform for the identification of different materials based on the reflected signals received by these units. In the wavelet scattering feature extractor, data is propagated through a series of wavelet transforms, nonlinearities, and averaging to produce low-variance representations of the reflected radar signals. This work is unique in terms of the comparison of the utilized radar units and algorithms in material classification and includes real-time demonstrations that show strong performance by both units, with increased robustness offered by the cm-wave radar unit.