The Munich based technology group Rohde & Schwarz has been a strategic partner of fiveD since the end of July. The Radar Simulation Suite created by the startup from Erlangen takes radar simulations to the next level, closing the gap between reality and virtual worlds. This expertise will help Rohde & Schwarz to further expand its market leadership in the field of contactless security checks.
As a future-oriented company, Rohde & Schwarz collaborates with many national and international universities. The group has a particularly longstanding and successful collaborative partnership with the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg and its Institute of Microwaves and Photonics (LHFT), where the founders of fiveD worked as doctoral candidates.
Andreas Hägele, Vice President Microwave Imaging at Rohde & Schwarz, explains: “The founding of fiveD and our participation were the next logical steps. Rohde & Schwarz is a highly innovative company that has found the perfect match in fiveD. This strategic partnership will further expand our market-leading position in the field of security scanners.” Marcel Hoffmann, Managing Director of fiveD, adds, “This joint venture combines the flexibility of a startup with the clout of a corporate group. We are particularly pleased that Rohde & Schwarz thinks long-term. Rohde & Schwarz is also a clearly technology-driven company that is aware of the importance and enormous potential of hyper-realistic radar simulations.”
Radar Simulation Suite takes the entire chain of effects into account
Radar is the basic sensor technology for many autonomous systems. In assisted driving, for example, it is used for speed and distance measurement. Radar sensors emit electromagnetic waves that reflect off objects in the environment. By evaluating these reflections, the radar provides a detailed understanding of the surrounding area. Among other things, it becomes clear where objects are located and how fast they are moving. To transfer this process from the real world to the virtual world, you have to consider the entire chain of effects and ensure that they are physically correct: radar, waves, environment, signal processing and potential influencing factors such as phase noise and calibration errors. And that is the goal that fiveD is pursuing. Its Radar Simulation Suite, a pioneering software tool that will soon enter the market, realistically simulates radars.
“Until now, there has been a gap between reality and virtual worlds in radar simulations. By closing this gap, we can now obtain virtual data with an unprecedented level of quality,” says Hägele. This data will further improve the development of Rohde & Schwarz security scanners. The scanners, which use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect potentially dangerous objects, are used at airports and for critical infrastructure around the world, enabling fast, contactless security checks.
The larger the data set used to train the AI, the better its performance. The database has so far been created with real test subjects, who walked through the security scanner. In the future, it will be possible to expand this data set almost indefinitely using a wide variety of virtual people to enable a rapid response to dynamically changing security requirements.
The fifth dimension for radar data
The Radar Simulation Suite also eliminates another bottleneck for AI: the manual labeling of countless individual data points. Neural networks require these labels during the initial training process, in which they learn to categorize information correctly. This widespread manual process is time-consuming and error-prone. The fiveD software suite, on the other hand, labels the data automatically and therefore much more quickly, accurately, and completely free of errors. This type of labeling allows fiveD to add a fifth dimension to radar data, which is otherwise four-dimensional due to its 3D spatial image and speed information. That's where the company’s name comes from: fiveD stands for the new fifth dimension in the radar world.
Aside from the Rohde & Schwarz security scanners, there will be many areas of application for this five-dimensional radar data in the medium to long term. This key technology is, for instance, already in high demand in the automotive and industrial sectors, since it enables the necessary innovation leap in development.