Advanced Radars for Railway Crossing Area Safety Improvement

Level crossings are critical elements of railway networks where a large number of accidents take place every year. With the recent enforcement of new and higher-safety standards for railway transportation systems, dedicated and reliable technologies for level crossing surveillance must be introduced in order to comply with the safety requirements. In this context, multi-static radars exploiting the ultrawide-band (UWB) technology represents a promising solution to save lives and, at the same time, to avoid costly false alarms. In particular, by taking advantage of the large bandwidth, the capability of detecting, localizing and discriminating the vehicle/obstacle that might be entrapped in a level crossing area 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.