Sergii Lukin

About the research project “Road Traffic Monitoring System based on Passive Coherent Location Technique and Tomographic Ground SAR (RTMS PCL TGSAR)”

Research line: Passive radars, an emerging green technology for traffic (aerial, ground and maritime) monitoring and critical infrastructure protection

Mentor: Prof. María del Pilar Jarabo Amores

Abstract

Demand is growing for optimization of road traffic flow in city streets and highways because the ever-increasing number of motorbikes, cars, trucks, etc. causes critical increase in traffic load. This leads to increase of air pollution, traffic jams that increases economic loss and decreases life quality. One of the goals of Smart City is to minimize these negative effects, e.g. by distributing traffic load uniformly across the city. To achieve this goal, the traffic load must be measured first with precision and classification in key points of the automotive infrastructure.

Several types of systems are already in place, like electronic toll collection systems (ETC) at highway entrances/exits; inductive coils under the road surface; police and surveillance traffic cameras and Doppler radars. However, neither of those systems is sufficient since they supply a count of the vehicles and their speeds but are unable to classify them: small cars, large cars, trucks, buses, trams etc.

We suggest applying a Passive Coherent Location (PCL) approach in combination with tomographic ground SAR for design of new Road Traffic Monitoring System (RTMS) that is effective also at night and in poor visibility. The proposed system utilizes a source of opportunity (DVB-T/T2 transmitter or 4G/5G base stations) as a radar sounding signal and transmits no signals of its own. Via spars antenna array the system enables producing real-time 3D images of the monitored road part. The required high range resolution is provided via exploiting a high angular resolutions of spars antenna array used in tilted orientation.

About Sergii Lukin

Sergii K. Lukin has a background in signal processing for radar and software and firmware development. He has researched radar signal processing for noise radar, 2D and 3D SAR and MIMO image formation and development of FPGA firmware for these purposes. He obtained his degree in Electronic Engineering at the Kharkiv National Aerospace University in 2010 and joined the Department for Nonlinear Dynamics of Electronic Systems in Usikov Institute for Radiophysics and Electronics of NAS of Ukraine. There he had held the position of junior researcher until 2014, mainly focusing on Noise Radar Technology in active ground SAR systems for tomographic imaging in microwave and millimeter wave bands. In 2015 he enrolled into PhD programme at Parthenope University of Naples. There he researched SAR and MIMO image formation in Stepped Frequency Radar and Noise Radar for automotive applications. He obtained his PhD degree in Information Engineering in 2018. He then returned to the Department for Nonlinear Dynamics of Electronic Systems in Usikov Institute for Radiophysics and Electronics of NAS of Ukraine and obtained the position of researcher, which he held for almost two years, acquiring further experience in the field of 2D and 3D tomographic SAR imaging systems, as well as computer simulation and experimental validation of such systems. During these years he has attended several summer and winter schools (in 2009, 2013, 2015 and 2018) on topics related to FPGA-based reconfigurable instrumentation and application of reconfigurable computing to scientific research at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. He has co-authored and published 14 articles in peer-reviewed journals and 16 papers in international conferences. Currently, he is developing the RTMS PCL TGSAR project as a GET-COFUND Marie Curie Fellow at UAH.