Air- and spaceborne monitoring of road traffic using SAR moving target indication—Project TRAMRAD

To ensure mobility, future road traffic management urgently needs actual and reliable information about the road traffic over wide areas in order to keep the traffic moving and the travel time short. Nowadays, outside of motorways the actual traffic situation is almost unknown due to the lack of sensor installations. This is the background for the TRAMRAD (Traffic Monitoring with Radar) project. TRAMRAD aims at profiting from research and development in earth observation and advances in radar remote sensing techniques to define realizable future air- or spaceborne sensor systems for the wide area monitoring of road traffic. The project comprises the necessary theoretical and practical investigations, as well as experimental campaigns with airborne instruments. The paper describes the requirements for the systems and the concepts being investigated. In particular, it discusses the complex detection conditions, the requirements on the radar instrument and the methods for processing the data. Possible system concepts are described and their capabilities are discussed.