MIMO through-wall radar 3-D imaging of a human body in different postures

Abstract

This paper focuses on three-dimensional (3-D) imaging for the human body with different postures to enhance the situation awareness ability of through-wall radar. First, we design a two-dimensional MIMO array where the receiving antennas are uniformly and sparsely arranged in horizontal and vertical directions and four time-division multiplexing transmitting elements are placed at the four array corners. As a result, the equivalent aperture is closed to four times the size of the physical array. Second, an identical time-delay wall compensation algorithm attached to back-projection algorithm is presented to easily and approximately correct the image distortion caused by wall penetration, which employs an identical time-delay offset in the whole 3-D pixel-to-pixel imaging process to partially balance out multiple different focusing time-delay errors corresponding to multiple transmit-receive channels in each pixel. Finally, we develop a human body model with three typical postures in the FDTD simulation. Based on the MIMO array and the time-delay compensation algorithm, the simulated images created via the back-projection algorithm clearly provide the identifiable posture characteristics.

Keywords:

• Through-wall radar
• three-dimensional imaging
• wall compensation
• body posture detection

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under [grant number 61301266], [grant number 61501062] and [grant number 61401077]; Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under [grant number A1098524023901001063].