Effect and Compensation of Timing Jitter in Through-Wall Human Indication via Impulse Through-Wall Radar

Impulse through-wall radar (TWR) is considered as one of preferred choices for through-wall human indication due to its good penetration and high range resolution. Large bandwidth available for impulse TWR results in high range resolution, but also brings an atypical adversity issue not substantial in narrowband radars — high timing jitter effect, caused by the non-ideal sampling clock at the receiver. The fact that impulse TWR employs very narrow pulses makes little jitter inaccuracy large enough to destroy the signal correlation property and then degrade clutter suppression performance. In this paper, we focus on the timing jitter impact on clutter suppression in through-wall human indication via impulse TWR. We setup a simple timing jitter model and propose a criterion namely average range profile (ARP) contrast is to evaluate the jitter level. To combat timing jitter, we also develop an effective compensation method based on local ARP contrast maximization. The proposed method can be implemented pulse by pulse followed by exponential average background subtraction algorithm to mitigate clutters. Through-wall experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can dramatically improve through-wall human indication performance

an em modeling for rescue system design of buried people

The development of a rescue system for buried persons is a subject of growing importance in case of occurrence of natural disasters such as earthquake, landslides, or avalanches. In this paper a fully analytical model has been developed to get some fundamental a priori design characteristics. The proposed system is based on the detection of the victim movements due to its respiratory activity: in particular, when an electromagnetic (EM) wave impinges on a human body, the analysis of the reflected wave parameters such as amplitude, frequency, phase, or delay time allows for the detection of the breathing frequency. The model is simple on purpose because the great uncertainty concerning the characterization of many environmental parameters of a general situation makes a very detailed model useless. However, it is accurate enough to provide useful information about system design, filling the gap in the literature concerning the electromagnetic formulation of such kinds of problems. A system prototype was built using laboratory equipment to experimentally validate the model, and subsequently breathing frequency measurements were carried on, both in a lossless laboratory environment and in a lossy realistic scenario

Noncontact Vital Signs Detection

Human health condition can be accessed by measurement of vital signs, i.e., respiratory rate (RR), heart rate (HR), blood oxygen level, temperature and blood pressure. Due to drawbacks of contact sensors in measurement, non-contact sensors such as imaging photoplethysmogram (IPPG) and Doppler radar system have been proposed for cardiorespiratory rates detection by researchers.The UWB pulse Doppler radars provide high resolution range-time-frequency information. It is bestowed with advantages of low transmitted power, through-wall capabilities, and high resolution in localization. However, the poor signal to noise ratio (SNR) makes it challenging for UWB radar systems to accurately detect the heartbeat of a subject. To solve the problem, phased-methods have been proposed to extract the phase variations in the reflected pulses modulated by human tiny thorax motions. Advance signal processing method, i.e., state space method, can not only be used to enhance SNR of human vital signs detection, but also enable the micro-Doppler trajectories extraction of walking subject from UWB radar data.Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) radar is an alternative technique useful to remotely monitor human subject activities. Compared with UWB pulse radar, it relieves the stress on requirement of high sampling rate analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and possesses higher signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in vital signs detection. However, conventional SFCW radar suffers from long data acquisition time to step over many frequencies. To solve this problem, multi-channel SFCW radar has been proposed to step through different frequency bandwidths simultaneously. Compressed sensing (CS) can further reduce the data acquisition time by randomly stepping through 20% of the original frequency steps.In this work, SFCW system is implemented with low cost, off-the-shelf surface mount components to make the radar sensors portable. Experimental results collected from both pulse and SFCW radar systems have been validated with commercial contact sensors and satisfactory results are shown

Human Respiration Localization Method Using UWB Linear Antenna Array

Human respiration is the basic vital sign in remote monitoring. There has been remarkable progress in this area, but some challenges still remain to obtain the angle-of-arrival (AOA) and distinguish the individual signals. This paper presents a 2D noncontact human respiration localization method using Ultra-Wideband (UWB) 1D linear antenna array. The imaging reconstruction based on beamforming is used to estimate the AOA of the human chest. The distance-slow time 2D matrix at the estimated AOA is processed to obtain the distance and respiration frequency of the vital sign. The proposed method can be used to isolate signals from individual targets when more than one human object is located in the surveillance space. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated via the simulation and experiment results

Optmized patch-like antennas for through the wall radar imaging and preliminary results with frequency modulated interrupted continuous wave

This paper presents optimized patch-like antennas for Through The Wall Imaging (TTWI) radar applications in the frequency range 0.5-2 GHz, and preliminary results using Frequency Modulated Interrupted Continuous Waveform (FMICW). Results of numerical simulations using basic models of the antenna are presented. The antenna optimization was aimed at making the radiation pattern more directional by focusing the energy in a single lobe to be directed towards the wall and the targets to be detected. The optimized antenna was manufactured and its measured parameters are compared with the simulated results which show good agreement. Some preliminary results from the FMICW radar system using this antenna are presented