UWB Multistatic Radars for Obstacle Detection and Imaging in Railroad Crossing Areas

Multi-static radars exploiting the ultrawide-band (UWB) technology represent a promising solution to improve the safety of rail crossing surveillance areas in case of entrapped vehicles. In particular, by taking advantage of their large bandwidth, location and volume information about the obstacles can be obtained. To this purpose, we propose a hybrid approach combining the multi-static radar and mono-static imaging scanner concepts able to detect and localize the obstacle, as well as to roughly estimate its volume and shape, thus avoiding the deployment of moving transmitters or a large amount of antennas. The 3D imaging and volume estimation capabilities of the proposed solution are assessed using ray tracing simulations of the rail crossing surveillance area.