MAFAT Radar Challenge Revealed

We are excited to launch the “MAFAT Radar Challenge” — a data science competition in which participants are asked to distinguish between humans and animals in radar tracks.

Recent developments in radar technologies allow powerful doppler-pulse radars to be developed, detecting and tracking moving objects in different areas and applications. Object classification, i.e. determination of the type of the tracked object, is essential for such systems. Today, the task of classifying radar-tracked non-rigid objects, such as distinguishing between humans and animals, is mostly done by human operators.

The competition’s objective is to explore automated novel solutions that will enable the classification of humans and animals that are tracked by radar systems with high confidence and high accuracy. Participants’ goal is to classify segments of radar tracks of humans or animals using the I/Q signal matrix as an input. The task at hand is a binary classification task, the tracked objects are either humans or animals. Participants will get access to a unique dataset containing thousands of labeled radar track-segments.

This meetup will present:

A representative from the winning team of the previous MAFAT Challenge competition (“Fine-Grained Classification of Objects from Aerial Imagery”), Seffi (18:30-19:00)

Seffi will share his general insights about his personal experience of participating in a data science competitions and will present some technical aspects of the winning solution.

Our radar expert, Tom (19:00-19:30)

Tom will provide future competitors with some basic knowledge in radar data signal processing while also explaining the competition data specifics in detail.

Radar challenge team leader, Erez (19:30-20:00)

Erez will conclude the meetup by going through the competition details in full, starting from the registration process, and ending in collecting the prizes ($40,000 total prize pool!).

All presentations will be given in English.

The meetup will be broadcasted via the Ministry of Defense YouTube channel (link to the broadcast: https://youtu.be/mFYHInlwOL8).

Apply for the competition at:
https://mafatchallenge.mod.gov.il/

The competition page in CodaLab:
https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/25389