Distance Estimation Scheme Exploiting IR-UWB Radar with Clutter Suppressing Algorithm in Indoor Environments

Abstract

This paper proposes a distance estimation scheme with an impulse radio ultrawide-band (IR-UWB) radar for a long-range target in an indoor environment. When the pulse is transmitted from the IR-UWB radar and is reflected from the target, fading effects make it difficult to estimate the time-of-arrival of a direct path, which can be distorted by the clutter in indoor environments. The proposed scheme can improve the performance of distance estimation by mitigating the effect of the clutter with a low-rank approximation scheme and a singular value decomposition scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through experiments in a general office building, and the results of the experiment show that the proposed scheme can track the dynamic distance of a target from the radar up to 11 m in an open space and 14 m in a narrow corridor, respectively, with an average error of less than 0.2 m.