Portable Imaging UWB Radar System With Two-Element Receiving Array

UWB radar (UWBR) technology enables high-resolution (i) ranging in free space and in matter including ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technique; (ii) sensing/imaging in medical, industry, law-enforcement, defense and other applications. In this study, we examine the performance of two prototypes of UWBR “proof of concept” systems operating as a presence detector for through-wall sensing and imaging of individuals. The first system has one transmitter (Tx) and one receiver (Rx) assigned as 1-Tx&1-Rx. The second system noted as 1-Tx&2-Rx includes an additional Rx channel creating 2element Rx array. We implemented some advanced design solutions for antennas, Tx and Rx electronic circuits and radar controlling/processing software to provide versatility, low-complexity and easiness in use. In particular, all the processing/controlling functions are written and used in the Matlab environment. An ordinary desktop/notebook PC is used for interfacing to UWBR via a serial port for operational control and an in-built audio card for data acquisition. The scattered data are collected by the sound card operating in asynchronous mode with respect to the internal UWBR timer that simplifies the radar-computer interface. With this UWBR hardware and software, we examine several ideas on imaging of 2-D scenes with stationary and moving individuals by exploiting inherently high accuracy in time-of-arrival (ToA) and distance measuring, which are associated with the used impulsive signals. First, we try to track an individual behind a wall using the 1Tx&1-Rx system. Then, we investigate the ToA difference of the received signals in two Rx channels of the 1-Tx&2-Rx system to estimate the position of scattering objects in two dimensions (2-D). For this, several Matlab-based signal/image processing algorithms are tested and some related experimental results are reported.

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