Development of CW doppler radar prototyping environment used for vehicle recognition and parameter estimation

This paper deals mainly with the development of prototyping tools for continuous wave 24GHz Doppler radar (DR) DSP modules. The modules are planned to be used for land-based vehicles and they are oriented on the wide range of devices from a simple velocity estimator and a vehicle counter to a vehicle shape recognizer. The prototyping software includes Matlab/Simulink, SolidWorks and Altera Quartus packages, the hardware - DR Front-end, Altera/Terasic FPGA development kits, a PC with sound card and video camera. Self-made software tools are briefly described. These tools have been used for the acquisition of real DR signals, video capturing of vehicle, testing of DR signal processing algorithms, simulation of DR behaviour in the context of urban traffic and comparison of experimental data with simulation results.