Classification of Road Traffic from Microwave Profiles

A microwave system has been developed which can automatically classify vehicles in real time into at least five groups: cars, light goods, medium goods, heavy goods and buses (bicycles were too infrequent to be assessed) to accuracies of about 75%. The system is based on FMCW radar to derive range and it uses the Doppler shift to derive speed. The "lookalike" profile is then automatically catalogued into one of the five groups according to length and height criteria.