Real-Time Radar Imaging and Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

The necessity of continuous and real-time surveillance and situational awareness by means of radar systems is a recognized as a necessity in a large set of civilian and security applications, ranging from indoor surveillance to elder care, anti-intrusion, and search and rescue during crisis, to cite just a few examples. Another important necessity is related to the fast imaging of large investigated area domains by means of effective data processing, when the aim is to provide results in reasonable time for static environments, such as in diagnostics and monitoring related to cultural heritage, critical and civil infrastructures, public buildings, etc.

It is worth noting that the high efficacy of radar imaging approaches is key to the development of advanced data processing strategies able to perform detection and tracking of targets in electromagnetically challenging scenarios, such as through-wall, and inaccessible/hostile environments and areas to be surveilled.

The above necessities can be tackled by means of two main lines of research.

The first is the adoption of UWB radar systems exploiting not only monostatic but even MIMO configurations, where the focus is on the forward and inverse modeling of the electromagnetic scattering for the detection, localization and geometry estimation of the targets. In this way, one is also able to develop and use target detection and tracking approaches for real-time surveillance.

The second line of research is based on the use of “simple” CW radar systems, which exploit the Doppler effect. In this case, only the target detection is enabled and the related data processing requires research efforts for the development of sophisticated but effective approaches based on statistical approaches and artificial intelligence tools. In this context, there is an increasing interest in the problem of estimating the degree of occupancy of environments, which is a noteworthy information for situational awareness during ordinary and crisis scenarios.

These two lines of research have also opened the way to efforts in new fields, such as the use of non-cooperative electromagnetic sources (Wi-Fi, GPS, 5G signals) for target detection and localization, and the use of radars on UAV and drones, where there is the further difficulty of compensating for undesired deviations from an assigned trajectory as well as the oscillations/vibrations of the observational platform.

This Special Issue aims at providing an overview of recent scientific and technological advances in the fields of real-time sensing and imaging, in terms of hardware, modeling, and data processing. We invite investigators to contribute original research articles, as well as review articles, that explore these aspects.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Development of UWB radar systems for real-time sensing and imaging;
• Development of CW radar systems for real-time target detection and degree of occupancy estimation;
• Forward and inverse electromagnetic modeling for real-time imaging in static scenarios;
• Development of strategies for real-time target detection/tracking in challenging scenarios;
• Statistical methods and artificial intelligence tools for real-time radar sensing;
• Data processing approaches exploiting non-cooperative sources for real-time surveillance;
• Radar on UAV for real-time sensing and imaging;
• Integration of radar systems in surveillance systems exploiting other kinds of sensors (optical camera, infrared cameras, magnetometers, optic fiber sensors, etc.)
• Significant examples of case studies for real-time radar imaging and sensing.

Dr. Ilaria Catapano
Dr. Francesco Soldovieri
Guest Editors

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