Representation of Radar Micro-Dopplers Using Customized Dictionaries

Abstract

Human motions give rise to frequency modulations, known as micro-Dopplers, to continuous wave radar signals. Micro-Doppler signals have been extensively researched for the classification of different types of human motions as well as to distinguish humans from other moving targets. However, there are two main scenarios where the performance of existing algorithms deteriorates significantly-one, when the channel consists of multiple moving targets resulting in distorted signatures, and two, when the systems conditions during the training stage deviate significantly from the conditions during the test stage. In this chapter, it is demonstrated that both of these limitations can be overcome by representing the radar data through customized dictionaries, fine-tuned to provide sparser representations of the data, than traditional data-independent dictionaries such as Fourier or wavelets. The performances of the algorithms are evaluated with both simulated and measured radar data gathered from moving humans in indoor line-of-sight conditions.