Ultrawideband through-wall radar for detecting the motion of people in real time

Law enforcement officers and search-and-rescue workers often face the difficult task of determining the locations of people inside a building or obscured by smoke and debris. To address this problem, Time Domain Corporation (TDC) has developed a real-time, hand-held radar to detect the motion of persons in range and azimuth through non-metallic walls. This radar is a time modulated ultra-wide band (TM-UWB) impulse radar that generates a two-dimensional (2D) representation of moving targets in real time. The intentional transmit power emitted from the radar is comparable to the FCC Part 15, Class B limits. It has the following benefits: (1) covertness because of its ultra-low power noise-like signal, (2) high resolution at low radio frequencies for penetrating building materials, (3) reduced range ambiguities and clutter fold-over because of pseudo-random time modulation, and (4) clutter rejection because of the ultra-wide bandwidth of the signal. In this paper, an outline of the key parameters of the TDC prototype radar RadarVision2000 (RV2000) and a brief description of the algorithm that generates a motion map showing the range and direction of the moving people are presented. Some typical radar images of multiple targets for a variety of building materials and cluttered environment obtained using the prototype are shown. Finally, the paper presents some preliminary results for resolving the targets in the elevation plane along with a processing technique for reducing the intensity of multi-path responses in the images.