Low-cost radar surveillance of inland waterways for homeland security applications

Abstract

Low-cost radar systems have been developed for homeland security missions. These detect and track small maneuvering craft in the water. The systems consist of a conventional marine radar, a capture card that digitizes the radar signals, and a computer that processes them. We have an experimental system that can monitor western Lake Ontario. It runs in real time, with operator controls, and can store captured radar video. The achieved detection and tracking is demonstrated with recorded datasets. The combination of lower thresholds plus a sophisticated multi-target tracker gives excellent performance.