Improved denoising method for through-wall vital sign detection using UWB impulse radar

Abstract Noncontact vital sign detection is widely used in finding victims in post-disaster search and rescue, through-wall surveillance (TWS), and medical diagnosis and monitoring. Human subject can be remotely sensed by extracting life activities such as respiration and heartbeat. However, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is often low, particularly in complex environments, which results in errors in both range and respiration frequency (RF) estimation. To improve the accuracy, an improved system for the vital sign detection is presented which is based on impulse ultra-wideband (UWB) radar. The range is determined based on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of the standard deviation of the received signals. Further, the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) based frequency accumulation (FA) technique is presented to determine RF. Performance results are presented which show that the proposed method is superior to several well-known techniques.