Foreign Objects Intrusion Detection Using Millimeter Wave Radar on Railway Crossings

The safety of railway crossings are of great important for rail and road transportation, because serious accidents occur in this area. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out foreign objects detection on railway crossings in order to improve the safety. Traditionally, video surveillance is one such solution, but it suffer from weather and illumination conditions. Under the hard environment conditions, the image of railway crossings is failed to capture by the camera. We propose a foreign objects detection system based on millimeter wave radar which has a higher detection accuracy, without the limitation of weather and light. Unlike vision-based approach, it can operate in darkness, high or low light intensity environment. With a millimeter wave radar, we first obtain the reflected signal from objects or ground and perform signal processing algorithm to extract the targets and suppress the clutter from received signal. We evaluate the detection capabilities of the millimeter wave radar in level crossings of railway.