Detection of Breathing Rates in Through-wall UWB Radar Utilizing JTFA

Abstract

Through-wall ultra-wide band (UWB) radar has been considered as one of the preferred and non-contact technologies for the targets detection owing to the better time resolution and stronger penetration. The high time resolution is a result of a larger of bandwidth of the employed UWB pulses from the radar system, which is a useful tool to separate multiple targets in complex environment. The article emphasised on human subject localization and detection. Human subject usually can be detected via extracting the weak respiratory signals of human subjects remotely. Meanwhile, the range between the detection object and radar is also acquired from the 2D range-frequency matrix. However, it is a challenging task to extract human respiratory signals owing to the low signal to clutter ratio. To improve the feasibility of human respiratory signals detection, a new method is developed via analysing the standard deviation based kurtosis of the collected pulses, which are modulated by human respiratory movements in slow time. The range between radar and the detection target is estimated using joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA) of the analysed characteristics, which provides a novel preliminary signature for life detection. The breathing rates are obtained using the proposed accumulation method in time and frequency domain, respectively. The proposed method is validated and proved numerically and experimentally.