Millimeter-Wave Radar Detection and Localization of a Human in Indoor Complex Environments

Abstract

Nowadays, it is still a great challenge to detect and locate indoor humans using a frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar accurately. Due to the interference of the indoor environment and complex objects such as green plants, the radar signal may penetrate, reflect, refract, and scatter, and the echo signals will contain noise, clutter, and multipath of different characteristics. Therefore, a method combined with comprehensive non-target signal removal and human localization is proposed to achieve position estimation of a human target. Time-variant clutter is innovatively mitigated through time accumulation using point clustering. Ghost targets are reduced according to propagation path matching. The experimental results show that the method can locate the real target human within an average error of 0.195 m in multiple complex environments with green plants, curtains, or furniture using a 77 GHz millimeter-wave radar. Meanwhile, the proposed method performs better than conventional methods. The detection probability is 81.250% when the human is behind a potted plant and is 90.286% when beside it.