Francesco Fioranelli

Dr. Francesco Fioranelli


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

15Years (2012-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

View All Publications
6 August 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Lan LanLan Lan
Lan Lan
JXJingwei Xu
Jingwei Xu
Guisheng LiaoGuisheng Liao
Guisheng Liao
YZYuhong Zhang
Yuhong Zhang
FFFrancesco Fioranelli
Francesco Fioranelli
HSHing Cheung So
Hing Cheung So
Suppression of radar-to-radar jammers, especially the mainbeam jammers, has been an urgent demand in vehicular sensing systems with the expected increased number of vehicles equipped with radar systems. This paper deals with the suppression of mainbeam deceptive jammers with frequency diverse array (FDA)-multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, utilizing its extra degrees-of-freedom (DOFS) in the range domain. At the modelling stage, false targets, which lag several pulses behind the true target, are considered as a typical form of mainbeam jammers. To this end the data-independent beamforming is performed to suppress false targets by nulling at the equivalent transmit beampattern with an appropriate frequency increment. However, the suppression performance degrades in the presence of transmit spatial frequency mismatch, which could be induced by quantization errors, angle estimation errors and frequency increment errors. To solve this problem, a preset broadened nulling beamformer (PBN-BF) is proposed by placing artificial interferences with appropriate powers around the nulls of the equivalent transmit beampattern. In such a way, effective suppression of deceptive jammer can be guaranteed owing to the broadened notches. At the analysis stage, numerical results in a scenario with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the devised data-independent BF, and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio is improved compared with the conventional data-independent BF.

7 October 2019 in IEEE Sensors Journal
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Haobo LiHaobo Li
Haobo Li
ASAman Shrestha
Aman Shrestha
Hadi HeidariHadi Heidari
Hadi Heidari
Julien Le KernecJulien Le Kernec
Julien Le Kernec
FFFrancesco Fioranelli
Francesco Fioranelli
This paper presents a framework based on multi-layer bi-LSTM network (bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) for multimodal sensor fusion to sense and classify daily activities’ patterns and high-risk events such as falls. The data collected in this work are continuous activity streams from FMCW radar and three wearable inertial sensors on the wrist, waist, and ankle. Each activity has a variable duration in the data stream so that the transitions between activities can happen at random times within the stream, without resorting to conventional fixed-duration snapshots. The proposed bi-LSTM implements soft feature fusion between wearable sensors and radar data, as well as two robust hard-fusion methods using the confusion matrices of both sensors. A novel hybrid fusion scheme is then proposed to combine soft and hard fusion to push the classification performances to approximately 96% accuracy in identifying continuous activities and fall events. These fusion schemes implemented with the proposed bi-LSTM network are compared with conventional sliding window approach, and all are validated with realistic “leaving one participant out” (L1PO) method (i.e. testing subjects unknown to the classifier). The developed hybrid-fusion approach is capable of stabilizing the classification performance among different participants in terms of reducing accuracy variance of up to 18.1% and increasing minimum, worst-case accuracy up to 16.2%.

1 July 2020 in IEEE Sensors Journal
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
ASAman Shrestha
Aman Shrestha
Haobo LiHaobo Li
Haobo Li
Julien Le KernecJulien Le Kernec
Julien Le Kernec
FFFrancesco Fioranelli
Francesco Fioranelli
Recognition of human movements with radar for ambient activity monitoring is a developed area of research that yet presents outstanding challenges to address. In real environments, activities and movements are performed with seamless motion, with continuous transitions between activities of different duration and a large range of dynamic motions, compared with discrete activities of fixed-time lengths which are typically analysed in the literature. This paper proposes a novel approach based on recurrent LSTM and Bi-LSTM network architectures for continuous activity monitoring and classification. This approach uses radar data in the form of a continuous temporal sequence of micro-Doppler or range-time information, differently from from other conventional approaches based on convolutional networks that interpret the radar data as images. Experimental radar data involving 15 participants and different sequences of 6 actions are used to validate the proposed approach. It is demonstrated that using the Dopplerdomain data together with the Bi-LSTM network and an optimal learning rate can achieve over 90% mean accuracy, whereas range-domain data only achieved approximately 76%. The details of the network architectures, insights in their behaviour as a function of key hyper-parameters such as the learning rate, and a discussion on their performance across are provided in the paper.

31 July 2018 in IET Radar, Sonar & Navigation
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
JPJarez S. Patel
Jarez S. Patel
FFFrancesco Fioranelli
Francesco Fioranelli
DADavid Anderson
David Anderson
This review explores radar‐based techniques currently utilised in the literature to monitor small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drones; several challenges have arisen due to their rapid emergence and commercialisation within the mass market. The potential security threats posed by these systems are collectively presented and the legal issues surrounding their successful integration are briefly outlined. Key difficulties involved in the identification and hence tracking of these ‘radar elusive’ systems are discussed, along with how research efforts relating to drone detection, classification and radar cross section (RCS) characterisation are being directed in order to address this emerging challenge. Such methods are thoroughly analysed and critiqued; finally, an overall picture of the field in its current state is painted, alongside scope for future work over a broad spectrum.

24 April 2017 in IEEE Sensors Journal
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
ECEnea Cippitelli
Enea Cippitelli
FFFrancesco Fioranelli
Francesco Fioranelli
Ennio GambiEnnio Gambi
Ennio Gambi
Susanna SpinsanteSusanna Spinsante
Susanna Spinsante
This paper reviews recent works in the literature on the use of systems based on radar and RGB-Depth (RGB-D) sensors for fall detection, and discusses outstanding research challenges and trends related to this research field. Systems to detect reliably fall events and promptly alert carers and first responders have gained significant interest in the past few years in order to address the societal issue of an increasing number of elderly people living alone, with the associated risk of them falling and the consequences in terms of health treatments, reduced well-being, and costs. The interest in radar and RGB-D sensors is related to their capability to enable contactless and non-intrusive monitoring, which is an advantage for practical deployment and users’ acceptance and compliance, compared with other sensor technologies, such as video-cameras, or wearables. Furthermore, the possibility of combining and fusing information from The heterogeneous types of sensors is expected to improve the overall performance of practical fall detection systems. Researchers from different fields can benefit from multidisciplinary knowledge and awareness of the latest developments in radar and RGB-D sensors that this paper is discussing.

6 March 2018 in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
ZCZhaoxi Chen
Zhaoxi Chen
GLGang Li
Gang Li
FFFrancesco Fioranelli
Francesco Fioranelli
HGHugh Griffiths
Hugh Griffiths
In this letter, we propose two methods for personnel recognition and gait classification using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based on multistatic radar micro-Doppler signatures. Previous DCNN-based schemes have mainly focused on monostatic scenarios, whereas directional diversity offered by multistatic radar is exploited in this letter to improve classification accuracy. We first propose the voted monostatic DCNN (VMo-DCNN) method, which trains DCNNs on each receiver node separately and fuses the results by binary voting. By merging the fusion step into the network architecture, we further propose the multistatic DCNN (Mul-DCNN) method, which performs slightly better than VMo-DCNN. These methods are validated on real data measured with a 2.4-GHz multistatic radar system. Experimental results show that the Mul-DCNN achieves over 99% accuracy in armed/unarmed gait classification using only 20% training data and similar performance in two-class personnel recognition using 50% training data, which are higher than the accuracy obtained by performing DCNN on a single radar node.