Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging
Human gait recognition using radar.
Human gait recognition using radar.

Through-the-wall radar imaging is an emerging new technology allowing to “see” through obstacles such as walls, doors and other visually opaque materials. It covers a broad range of applications in a variety of contexts, such as fire and rescue missions, police missions and more recently in elderly care.

The Signal Processing Group has strong connections with the Center for Advanced Communications at Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA, where real measurements are acquired in the Radar Imaging Lab.

The focus of our work is mainly in analysis and processing of through-the-wall radar images, including image formation or beamforming, multipath exploitation, compressive sensing, detection, segmentation, feature extraction and classification.

For more information on through-the-wall radar imaging, see the sections below or contact the respective Research Associates.

Projects

Observing human gait plays a key role in medical diagnosis, biomedical engineering, physiotherapy and rehabilitation. For example, changes in gait patterns can reveal many neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s, at an early stage.

Recently, radar has become of increased interest in many applications, including automotive, medical and consumer industries. Due to its non-intrusive, non-wearable and privacy-preserving sensing, it can serve as an effective tool for contact-less human gait monitoring. The back-scattered radar signal of a human walk contains multiple overlaying signal components from different parts of the body, e.g. arms and legs. Each of these components has its own Doppler shift depending on the velocity of the moving body part.

These so-called micro-motions lead to distinct micro-Doppler signatures, which are typically represented in the time-frequency domain. Based on micro-Doppler signatures different targets or motions can be discerned.

This project deals with radar-based human gait analysis. For this, we classify different human walking styles within the class of human gait. The idea is to use radar as a diagnostic tool, which can pave the way for ambulatory medical gait analysis.

For more information on this research project or enquiries about Bachelor/Master thesis or Pro-/Project-Seminars, contact Abdelhak Zoubir .

Time-frequency representation of back-scatttered radar data from a walking person.