Shadow Effect Mitigation in Indication of Moving Human Behind Wall via MIMO TWIR

Abstract

In through-wall indication of a moving human target in enclosed structures, a shadow effect because of the human target blocking parts from illumination on the back wall will emerge, referred to as a “ghost” in indication results. The shadow ghost moves as the human target does, which makes causal change detection (CD) invalid to separate them. To mitigate the shadow ghost, we analyze its differences from the moving human target. Based on the difference that the illumination is only blocked in partial channels of the multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) array while target echoes exist in most channels and the fact that shadow ghosts overlap more between successive indication results than the imaged targets as a result of their larger size, we proposed a mitigation method including a coherence factor and noncausal CD processing. Through-wall experiments via a MIMO through-wall imaging radar validate the proposed method.