Video cameras are arguably the world's most used sensors for surveillance systems. They give a highly detailed representation of a situation that is easily interpreted by both humans and computers. However, these representations can lose part of their representational value when being recorded in less than ideal circumstances. Bad weather conditions, low-light illumination or concealing objects can make the representation more opaque. A radar sensor is a potential solution for these situations, since it is unaffected by the light intensity and can sense through most concealing objects. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a structured inference network on data of a low-power radar device. A structured inference network applies automated feature extraction by creating a latent space out of which the observations can be reconstructed. A classification model can then be trained on this latent space. This methodology allows us to perform experiments for both person identification and action recognition, resulting in competitive error rates ranging from 0% to 6.5% for actions recognition and 10% to 12% for person identification. Furthermore, the possibility of a radar sensor being used as a complement to a camera sensor is investigated.