Radar surveillance in urban environments

Radar surveillance in difficult environments like urban areas can be challenging due to large amounts of both multipath and clutter. Additionally, buildings and clutter like parked vehicles can produce shadowed areas where the line-of-sight is broken. We analyzed urban materials to determine how to utilize multipath to see into the shadows of urban environments, which polarization has the least loss, and which frequencies performed the best across a range of environments. Urban canyons were analyzed to determine whether there was more of a multipath effect on the measurements or a waveguide effect. The detection and tracking of non-line-of-sight moving objects using multiple bounces was attempted across a variety of urban building materials with an urban radar surveillance system. We demonstrate the detection and tracking of subjects using multipath returns, but there was no disambiguation of real or multipath sources. We also discuss the challenges of classification in an urban environment.