Marco Canil

Zaman Bhalli, Michele Rossi, Joerg Widmer et al.

Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) is recognized as a key enabler for future 6th Generation (6G) networks, combining communication capabilities with pervasive sensing. In such systems, the estimation of the Doppler shift plays a crucial role for target characterization. However, typical real-world ISAC scenarios largely involve bistatic or multistatic configurations and mobile ISAC nodes. Under these conditions, Doppler estimation becomes particularly challenging, as clock asynchrony between the Transmitter (TX) and the Receivers (RXs), combined with their mobility, introduces additional Doppler components and phase offsets that distort or disrupt the target-induced frequency shift. Existing works have considered these challenges separately or relied on external reference reflectors. In this paper, we present the first method to estimate the Doppler frequency of a target with mobile and asynchronous ISAC nodes in a multistatic configuration, considering the case of a mobile TX and multiple static RXs, and without leveraging any external reflector. By leveraging the invariance of the phase offsets across multipath components and exploiting geometrical relationships, we show that the problem is solvable if at least 4 RXs are present. We evaluate the proposed solution through numerical simulations in various scenarios, showing that it is a valid approach for estimating target Doppler shifts in unsynchronized multistatic ISAC deployments with mobile nodes.

Marco Canil, Jacopo Pegoraro, Michele Rossi

Social distancing and temperature screening have been widely employed to counteract the COVID-19 pandemic, sparking great interest from academia, industry and public administrations worldwide. While most solutions have dealt with these aspects separately, their combination would greatly benefit the continuous monitoring of public spaces and help trigger effective countermeasures. This work presents milliTRACE-IR, a joint mmWave radar and infrared imaging sensing system performing unobtrusive and privacy preserving human body temperature screening and contact tracing in indoor spaces. milliTRACE-IR combines, via a robust sensor fusion approach, mmWave radars and infrared thermal cameras. It achieves fully automated measurement of distancing and body temperature, by jointly tracking the subjects's faces in the thermal camera image plane and the human motion in the radar reference system. Moreover, milliTRACE-IR performs contact tracing: a person with high body temperature is reliably detected by the thermal camera sensor and subsequently traced across a large indoor area in a non-invasive way by the radars. When entering a new room, a subject is re-identified among several other individuals by computing gait-related features from the radar reflections through a deep neural network and using a weighted extreme learning machine as the final re-identification tool. Experimental results, obtained from a real implementation of milliTRACE-IR, demonstrate decimeter-level accuracy in distance/trajectory estimation, inter-personal distance estimation (effective for subjects getting as close as 0.2 m), and accurate temperature monitoring (max. errors of 0.5°C). Furthermore, milliTRACE-IR provides contact tracing through highly accurate (95%) person re-identification, in less than 20 seconds.