A ground vehicle classification approach using unmodulated continuous-wave radar

Vehicle classification is of great importance to the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems. In this paper, a novel ground vehicle classification approach using unmodulated CW radar is proposed. The radar is set up to look forward down to the road; vehicles are modelled as body targets composed of multiple scattering centers. Analysis shows that the spatial distribution of scattering centers can be derived from the Doppler signature of radar echo. Hough Transform is performed to estimate the distribution which is then used for classification. In experiments, vehicles are classified into three types at an average accuracy of 94.8%.