Waveform design for through-the-wall radar imaging applications

Target detection and classification are considered the primary tasks in through-the-wall radar imaging. Indoor targets can be stationary or in motion. In this paper, we apply the matched illumination concept to the scattered electromagnetic field of two stationary targets that are commonly found in an indoor environment, namely, a wooden chair and a wooden table. The optimal waveform was obtained by choosing the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of the target's autocorrelation matrix. The scattered field over the frequency band of 1-3 GHz was obtained by full wave numerical simulations using a commercially available Finite-Difference Time Domain solver (XFDTD from REMCOM). The detection performance of the optimum waveform against the commonly used linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal of the same bandwidth was compared.