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F. Fioranelli

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157 records found

Journal article (2026) - Mareike Wendelmuth, Alexander Yarovoy, Francesco Fioranelli
The problem of contactless accurate monitoring of vital signs of patients in psychiatric settings is addressed in this work. Most state-of-the-art radar-based approaches rely on measurements acquired at short distances with the sensor positioned directly in front of the subject’s chest, typically within 1 m, to ensure a strong line-of-sight signal. In contrast, we investigate a substantially more challenging and clinically safer configuration, where multiple frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars are mounted at ceiling height in a tilted position, remaining completely out of reach and outside the direct line of sight of patients. An experimental dataset involving 30 participants performing seven activities was collected using two of these ceiling-mounted radars and one reference radar mounted at hip height. A new processing pipeline is proposed with automatic range bin selection and fast autoregressive (AR) spectral estimation, including an approach that leverages all chirps per frame to improve performances with short observation window lengths. Despite the unfavorable sensing geometry and increased radar-to-subject distance, the results demonstrate that ceiling-mounted radars achieve mean absolute respiration rate errors comparable to the hip height reference radar. The best configuration yields a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.18 respirations per minute (rpm) for participants in a sitting position at distances exceeding 4 m from the ceiling-mounted radars. Moreover, the proposed AR-based method significantly improves estimation accuracy for short windows of 3.1 s, achieving a MAE below 4.3 rpm for all radars and participant positions. ...
Journal article (2026) - Simin Zhu, Satish Ravindran, Lihui Chen, Alexander Yarovoy, Francesco Fioranelli
The problem of estimating the mounting angle of millimeter-wave automotive radars installed on moving vehicles is investigated. We address this angle estimation problem during normal driving, without relying on controlled environments, dedicated radar targets, or specially designed driving routes. To achieve this, we propose a signal processing pipeline that combines radar and inertial measurement unit (IMU) data to enable accurate and reliable estimation under realistic driving conditions. Unlike previous studies, the method employs neural networks to process sparse and noisy radar measurements, reject detections from moving objects, and estimate radar motion. In addition, a measurement model is introduced to correct IMU bias and scale factor errors. Using vehicle kinematics, the radar mounting angle is then computed from the estimated radar motion and the vehicle’s yaw rate. To benchmark performance, the proposed approach is comprehensively compared with two alternative problem formulations and four estimation techniques reported in the literature. Validation is carried out on the challenging RadarScenes dataset, covering over 79 km of real-world driving with different velocities and trajectories. Results show that stable and accurate mounting angle estimates are obtained within approximately 25 seconds of driving. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that automotive radar mounting angles can be estimated during complex, real traffic conditions using only onboard sensor data. ...
Journal article (2026) - Apostolos Pappas, Tworit Dash, Alexander Yarovoy, Francesco Fioranelli, Shafi Sardar, Marc Schleiss
To characterize atmospheric turbulence, the Doppler moments are estimated by weather radars. However, moment accuracy is highly sensitive to radar transmission parameters such as pulse repetition time (Ts) and number of pulses (Np), which affect Doppler ambiguity and estimation variance. Traditional fixed-parameter radars face trade-offs between aliasing and measurement precision. This paper proposes an adaptive radar framework that dynamically adjusts Ts and Np on a per-scan basis to improve Doppler moment estimation at a single resolution cell level. Inspired by the Fully Adaptive Radar (FAR) concept, the method also includes a novel multi-lag Doppler width estimation scheme. Results demonstrate enhanced estimation accuracy, enabling better responsiveness to localized and non-stationary weather conditions. ...

Simultaneous Static-Moving Segmentation and Ego-Motion Estimation using Radar Point Clouds

Journal article (2026) - Simin Zhu, Satish Ravindran, Alexander Yarovoy, Francesco Fioranelli
Conventional radar segmentation research has typically focused on learning category labels for different moving objects. Although fundamental differences between radar and optical sensors lead to differences in the reliability of predicting accurate and consistent category labels, a review of common radar perception tasks in automotive applications reveals that determining whether an object is moving or static is a prerequisite for most tasks. To fill this gap, this study proposes a neural network (NN)-based solution that can simultaneously segment static and moving objects from radar point clouds. Furthermore, since the measured radial velocity of static objects is correlated with the motion of the radar, this approach can also estimate the instantaneous 2-D velocity of the moving platform/vehicle (ego-motion). Notably, despite performing dual tasks, the proposed method employs very simple yet effective building blocks for feature extraction: multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and recurrent NNs (RNNs). In addition to being the first of its kind in the literature, the proposed method also demonstrates the feasibility of extracting the information required for the dual tasks directly from unprocessed point clouds, without the need for cloud aggregation, Doppler compensation, motion compensation, or any other intermediate signal processing steps. To measure its performance, this study introduces a set of novel evaluation metrics and tests the proposed method using a challenging real-world radar dataset, RadarScenes. The results show that the proposed method not only performs well on the dual tasks but also has broad application potential in other radar perception tasks. More qualitative results can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/3ejS1chSvQ8?si=uGRugVA63BCyvNBV ...
Review (2026) - Ilkka Laakso, Margarethus Marius Paulides, Sachiko Kodera, Seungyoung Ahn, Christopher L. Brace, Marta Cavagnaro, Ji Chen, Zhi De Deng, Francesco Fioranelli, More authors...
This roadmap provides a comprehensive and forward-looking perspective on the individualized application and safety of non-ionizing radiation (NIR) dosimetry in diagnostic and therapeutic medicine. Covering a wide range of frequencies, i.e. from low-frequency to terahertz, this document provides an overview of the current state of the art and anticipates future research needs in selected key topics of NIR-based medical applications. It also emphasizes the importance of personalized dosimetry, rigorous safety evaluation, and interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure safe and effective integration of NIR technologies in modern therapy and diagnosis. ...
Journal article (2026) - Y. Wu, F. Fioranelli, C. Gao
Radar-based human activity recognition (RadHAR) is an attractive alternative to wearables and cameras because it preserves privacy, is contactless, and is robust to occlusions. However, dominant convolutional neural network (CNN)- and recurrent neural network (RNN)-based solutions are computationally intensive at deployment, and recent lightweight vision transformer (ViT) and state-space model (SSM) variants still exhibit substantial complexity. In this article, we present RadMamba, a parameter-efficient, micro-Doppler-oriented Mamba SSM tailored to radar HAR under on-sensor compute, latency, and energy constraints typical of distributed radar systems. RadMamba combines 1) channel fusion with downsampling; 2) Doppler-aligned segmentation that preserves the physical continuity of Doppler over time; and 3) convolutional token projections that better capture Doppler-span variations, thereby retaining temporal–Doppler structure while reducing the number of Floating-point Operations/Inference (\# FLOP/Inf.). Evaluated across three datasets with different radars and types of activities, RadMamba matches the prior best 99.8% accuracy of a recent SSM-based model on the continuous wave (CW) radar dataset, while requiring only 1/400 of its parameters. On a dataset of non-continuous activities with frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar, RadMamba remains competitive with leading 92.0% results using about 1/10 of the parameters, and on a continuous FMCW radar dataset it surpasses methods with far more parameters by at least 3%, using only 6.7k parameters. ...
Conference paper (2025) - S. Chaganti, F. Fioranelli, R.T. Rajan
Traditional target tracking using monostatic radar systems typically rely on centralized or decentralized architectures, where all data is transmitted to a fusion center for estimating the position and velocity of mobile agents. This approach introduces a single point of failure and can significantly increase communication costs, particularly when the fusion center is far from individual radar nodes. To overcome these issues, we introduce a distributed Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for target localization using a radar network, wherein each radar node shares its observed data only with its immediate neighboring nodes, and achieves consensus with the radar network on the estimated target locations and velocities. We perform simulations incorporating critical system parameters such as the number of radar nodes and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to assess their impact of estimation accuracy and convergence speed of the proposed distributed ADMM algorithm. We highlight the additional benefits of our proposed solution, and present directions for future work. ...
Journal article (2025) - Nakorn Kumchaiseemak, Francesco Fioranelli, Theerawit Wilaiprasitporn
This article presents the first subject-specific head pose estimation approach using only one frequency-modulated continuous wave radar data frame. Specifically, the proposed method incorporates a deep learning framework to estimate head pose rotation and orientation frame-by-frame by combining a convolutional neural network operating on range-angle radar plots and a PeakConv network. The proposed method is validated with an in-house collected dataset, including annotated head movements that varied in roll, pitch, and yaw, and these were recorded in two different indoor environments. It is shown that the proposed model can estimate head poses with a relatively small error of approximately 6.7°–14.4° for all rotational axes and is capable of generalizing to unseen, new environments when trained in one scenario (e.g., lab) and tested in another (e.g., office), including in the cabin of a car. ...
Journal article (2025) - Ignacio E. Lopez-Delgado, Dingyang Wang, Francesco Fioranelli, Jesus Grajal
Monitoring gait symmetry reliably is crucial, as it is an early indicator of Parkinson's disease (PD). In this work, a method is presented to analyze gait asymmetries using a 24-GHz frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar in a nonclinical environment. The proposed method is validated by analyzing the gait of 60 people recorded in an environment that presents multiple challenges such as multipath, gait interruption events, and different trajectories, which cause aspect angle variability. This article presents algorithms to address these challenges to extract useful gait information from the radar data and discusses the performance of the proposed system, analyzing the ratio of correct feet identifications and the accuracy of the asymmetry gait parameters. It achieved a mean absolute error of the symmetry ratio below 8% for all gait parameters. This shows that the proposed system and algorithms are robust for both clinical and in-home implementations. ...
Conference paper (2025) - S. Yuan, S. Chiavazza, F. Corradi, F. Fioranelli
We consider the problem of the large amount of data produced by current radar systems, particularly Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars, with the goal of minimizing latency and memory usage in signal processing pipelines for edge-based applications. Drawing inspiration from event-based cameras, we propose a novel event-based radar perception method that utilizes only two single snapshots to achieve performance levels suitable for current radar applications. After mathematically deriving the approach, we validate its effectiveness through both simulations and real-world experiments involving multiple targets. ...

Unsynchronized Radar Sensor Fusion for Robust Vehicle Ego-Motion Estimation

Journal article (2025) - Simin Zhu, Satish Ravindran, Lihui Chen, Alexander G. Yarovoy, Francesco Fioranelli
This article studies the problem of estimating the 2-D motion state of a moving vehicle (ego motion) using millimeter-wave (mmWave) automotive radar sensors. Unlike prior single-radar or synchronized radar systems, the proposed approach (named DeepEgo+) can achieve sensor fusion and estimate ego motion using an unsynchronized radar sensor network. To achieve this goal, DeepEgo+ combines two neural network (NN)-based components (i.e., Module A for motion estimation and Module B for sensor fusion) with a decentralized processing architecture using the late fusion technique. Specifically, each radar sensor in the network has a Module A that processes its output and computes an initial motion estimate, while Module B fuses the initial estimates from all radar sensors and outputs the final estimate. This novel architecture and fusion scheme not only eliminates the synchronization requirement but also provides robustness and scalability to the system. To benchmark its performance, DeepEgo+ has been tested using a challenging real-world radar dataset, RadarScenes. The results show that DeepEgo+ provides significant performance advantages over recent state-of-the-art approaches in terms of estimation accuracy, long-term stability, and robustness against high outlier ratios and sensor failures. Furthermore, the influence of vehicle nonzero acceleration on ego-motion estimation is identified for the first time, and DeepEgo+ demonstrates the feasibility of compensating for its effect and further improving the estimation accuracy. ...
Journal article (2025) - N. C. Kruse, A. Daalman, F. Fioranelli, A. Yarovoy
Classification of human activities performed sequentially and with unconstrained durations using radar sensors has been studied in this work. A novel processing pipeline comprising a sequence segmentation stage, a segment processing stage, and a classification stage has been proposed to address this challenge. Specifically, the segmentation stage has been implemented by monitoring Rényi entropy for fluctuations in the radar data, with the entropy, derived from micro-Doppler spectrograms, functioning as a descriptive quantity of the activity being performed. The method has been experimentally verified on a challenging, publicly available dataset collected with a network of five simultaneously operating pulsed ultrawideband radars. Classification performance has been compared to reference works in the literature on the same dataset, and a test accuracy and macro F1-score of 89.3% and 82.0% have been, respectively, demonstrated. ...
Journal article (2025) - Botao Sun, Ignacio Roldan, Francesco Fioranelli
In this paper, an automatic labelling process is presented for automotive datasets, leveraging on complementary information from LiDAR and camera. The generated labels are then used as ground truth with the corresponding 4D radar data as inputs to a proposed semantic segmentation network, to associate a class label to each spatial voxel. Promising results are shown by applying both approaches to the publicly shared RaDelft dataset, with the proposed network achieving over 65% of the LiDAR detection performance, improving 13.2% in vehicle detection probability, and reducing 0.54 m in terms of Chamfer distance, compared to variants inspired from the literature. ...
Journal article (2025) - Mujtaba Hassan, Francesco Fioranelli, Alexander Yarovoy, Satish Ravindran, Luihi Chen
The problem of estimating instantaneous distributed target velocity using noisy measurements by multiple asynchronous automotive radar sensors is investigated. Two novel neural networks (NNs)-based approaches are proposed to address the problem. Both NNs use the point cloud with radar detections as an input. In the first approach, a hybrid NN is designed to take a set of points inside a cluster as its input, extract spatial-dynamic features to be used as weights for each input point, and apply them to obtain a weighted least square (WLS) solution for instantaneous velocity estimation. To this end, dedicated loss functions are proposed to allow the model to predict weights that can follow a velocity profile curve satisfying target constraints. Moreover, a small offset in the radial velocity value of each point is applied to adjust errors in the sensor measurements. In the second approach, a deep NN is proposed that takes a set of points inside a cluster as its input and directly outputs velocity estimates. Both approaches have been verified experimentally using the large open-source automotive RadarScenes dataset. The results show a significant improvement in terms of mean absolute error in velocity estimation over the state-of-the-art alternative techniques. Moreover, the estimated velocity is used as an additional measurement value inside a target tracker. Results show that this can increase the performance of the tracker, especially during challenging scenarios such as abrupt changes in the velocity of the target. ...
Conference paper (2025) - S. Chiavazza, S. Yuan, F. Fioranelli, F. Corradi
Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars determine a target’s range, velocity, and angle of arrival by performing multiple Fourier analyses on received signals. However, this processing is conventionally frame-based, requiring waiting for an entire frame of data to be stored in memory and processed. In this work, we propose an event-based approach to two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) radar processing using Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Unlike standard pipelines that demand large data buffers for range-Doppler analysis, our method operates chirp-by-chirp, thus allowing for low-latency estimates. Using mathematical derivations and computer simulations, we demonstrate the same performance of a traditional 2D FFT processing pipeline, while offering a viable event-based alternative to conventional frame-based solutions for FMCW radar systems. ...
Conference paper (2025) - D. Wang, A. Yarovoy, F. Fioranelli
The problem of radar-based multi-target tracking for indoor human monitoring is considered. Tracking and counting the number of people moving as a group is particularly challenging as multiple individuals are close together and their radar signatures are mixed. A transformer-based classification approach for counting the number of grouped people is proposed. The Neural Network model is trained with selected features from the spatial domain and Doppler frequency domain, which are concatenated over multiple frames to form a sequence for the transformer network. Compared to statistical classifiers, the self-attention mechanism allows transformers to capture feature long-term dependencies. The proposed classifier is integrated into a tracking pipeline in order to monitor the position and number of people in the grouped targets. The method proposed is experimentally verified using a 24 GHz Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar with 250MHz bandwidth. Despite the relatively coarse range resolution, the proposed method achieves 92.5% accuracy in these initial tests. Furthermore, the method performances and related accuracy is analyzed according to various parameters. ...
Journal article (2025) - S. Yuan, T.K. Dash, I. Roldan Montero, F. Fioranelli, Alexander Yarovoy
The problem of diminished unambiguous target velocity interval induced by the time-division-multiplex mode (TDM) of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) automotive radar has been explored. A novel MIMO antenna array activation mode and a parametric approach for Doppler de-aliasing based on a two-step cross-entropy optimization are proposed. The TDM Doppler signal model has been derived, and a novel two-step cost function is proposed to achieve robust and efficient estimation. In contrast to the state-of-the-art method, the method proposed does not need multiple overlapped antennas and can resolve multiple targets in the same range and Doppler bins. The proposed method has been verified with numerical simulations with different parameter settings, as well as experimental data from a radar target simulator. ...
Conference paper (2025) - M. Wendelmuth, A. Yarovoy, F. Fioranelli
The problem of estimating breathing rates and detecting apnea events with radars located at an elevated and tilted position is considered in this paper. This is particularly relevant in psychiatric clinics, where radars (or other sensors) must be installed out of reach of patients. In this work, a feasibility study is presented, using an experimental setup with two 60 GHz Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars placed at 2.7 m height at a tilted angle towards the participants, and one radar at 1 m height looking straight to the participants, who are sitting and lying on the floor. A new comprehensive dataset with 30 participants and 7 activities was collected with this setup. Using phase extraction and filtering, the work presents an apnea detection probability of up to 90 % with an elevated radar, and comparable mean error rates for breathing estimation of below 2 respirations per minute (rpm) for all radars. The results show that the respiration data and apnea detection from all radar positions are comparable. This proves the feasibility of the proposed radar deployment positions, benefiting application fields such as psychiatric care. ...
Journal article (2025) - Wietse Bouwmeester, Francesco Fioranelli, Alexander Yarovoy
In this article, the classification of dynamic vulnerable road users (VRUs) using polarimetric automotive radar is considered. To this end, a signal processing pipeline for polarimetric automotive MIMO radar is proposed, including a method to enhance angular resolution by combining data from all polarimetric channels. The proposed signal processing pipeline is applied to measurement data of three different types of VRUs and a car, collected with a custom automotive polarimetric radar, developed in collaboration with Huber+Suhner AG. Several polarimetric features are estimated from the range-velocity signatures of the measured targets and are subsequently analyzed. A Bayesian classifier and a convolutional neural network (CNN) using these estimated polarimetric features are proposed and their performance is compared against their single-polarized counterparts. It is found that for the Bayesian classifier, a significant increase in classification performance is achieved, compared to the same classifier using single polarized information. For the CNN-based classifier, utilizing the distribution of polarimetric features of the target’s range-velocity signatures also increases classification performance, compared to its single-polarized version. This shows that polarimetric information is valuable for classification of VRUs and objects of interest in automotive radar. ...
Journal article (2025) - Sen Yuan, Francesco Fioranelli, Alexander Yarovoy
The role of radar for building situation awareness in (semi)autonomous vehicles is severely restricted by its low angular resolution. The physical size of the radar, which determines its antenna aperture size and thus the radar angular resolution, is often a subject of stringent limitations to physically fit the system in the vehicles. Multiple input multiple output systems are used to increase the achievable angular resolution, and these are often combined in the literature with algorithms inspired by synthetic aperture radar techniques that exploit the velocity of the vehicle itself for finer resolution. Some of the most common approaches are reviewed, in this context, with a specific focus on challenges for the implementation of data collected in real driving scenarios. Key experimental results using representative algorithms and driving data collected in the city of Delft, The Netherlands, are presented and discussed. ...