An UGS radar with micro-Doppler capabilities for wide area persistent surveillance

Abstract

Detecting humans and distinguishing them from natural fauna is an important issue in security applications to reduce false alarm rates. In particular, it is important to detect and classify people who are walking in remote locations and transmit back detections over extended periods at a low cost and with minimal maintenance. The ability to discriminate men versus animals and vehicles at long range would give a distinct sensor advantage. The reduction in false positive detections due to animals would increase the usefulness of detections, while dismount identification could reduce friendly-fire. We developed and demonstrate a compact radar technology that is scalable to a variety of ultra-lightweight and low-power platforms for wide area persistent surveillance as an unattended, unmanned, and man-portable ground sensor. The radar uses micro-Doppler processing to characterize the tracks of moving targets and to then eliminate unimportant detections due to animals or civilian activity. This paper presents the system and data on humans, vehicles, and animals at multiple angles and directions of motion, demonstrates the signal processing approach that makes the targets visually recognizable, and verifies that the UGS radar has enough micro-Doppler capability to distinguish between humans, vehicles, and animals.

Micro-Doppler classification of riders and riderless horses

“…Comparison with previous work [14] on horse and rider is given in Figure 6. The spectrogram in this case does not have range extent, and so the detection of the rider is not as easy.…”

“…Independent component analysis (ICA) can be used to extract independent basis functions from the spectrogram to be used as features in a classifier [13]. Micro-Doppler signatures have been suggested as a biometric [8], for distinguishing fauna from humans [14], and micro-Doppler features have been used in classification algorithms in [15,16,17]. Micro-Doppler signatures and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimates have been extracted at over nine meters range through a brick wall [18].…”

Road Users Classification Based on Bi-Frame Micro-Doppler With 24-GHz FMCW Radar

“…In (Tahmoush et al, 2010), a 16 points scattering model of a 1.8m tall person walking at 1.5 m/s, as shown in Figure 4, is discussed. Figure 5 and Figure 6A show the movement of the corresponding simulated limbs and time-frequency spectrum, respectively.…”

Portable Microwave Radar Systems for Short-Range Localization and Life Tracking: A Review

“…Micro-Doppler features have been used to differentiate targets among humans, animals and vehicles [ 79 ]. Researchers have found that it is possible to use micro-Doppler features to identify if the human subject is carrying a weapon [ 80 ].…”