Moving human target CFAR detection along slow-time profile in ultrawide band through-wall radar

Abstract

Constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods are generally applied for the target detection after clutter mitigation in the through-wall sensing applications using ultra-wide band through-wall radar. Current studies of CFAR only focus on detection of moving human targets without considering the effect of residual clutters. However, in the cases with the presence of strong stationary clutters, little residual clutters after clutter mitigation are strong enough to cause false alarms in the following target detection, compared with the weak human target echoes. Unfortunately, conventional CFAR methods fail to remove the effect of residual clutters and suffer from false alarms. To combat this problem and obtain a reliable detection performance, a moving target CFAR detection method along slow-time profile is proposed in this paper. Experiments with an impulse through wall radar show that the proposed method not only has good detection performance for moving human targets, but also successfully gets rid of the problems brought by the strong residual stationary clutters.