Penetrating radar systems for urban operations - Annual report 2010

Authors:

  • Stefan Nilsson
  • Magnus Gustavsson
  • Magnus Herberthson
  • Tommy Johansson
  • Mikael Karlsson
  • Anders Nelander
  • Jonas Rahm
  • Ain Sume
  • Anders Örbom

Publish date: 2010-12-27

Report number: FOI-R--3085--SE

Pages: 32

Written in: Swedish

Keywords:

  • "See-through-the-wall"
  • wall penetrating radar
  • FMCW
  • monopulse radar
  • waveguide antennas
  • array antennas
  • polarization
  • urban scenario
  • battle-field surveillance
  • SAR
  • ISAR

Abstract

This annual report gives an account of the activities carried out and the results produced so far in the second year of the three-year Armed Forces' project Penetrating Radar Systems for Urban Operations. The project involves a further development of the competence and technique platform established by FOI through earlier efforts in the areas of wall penetrating radar and radar for seeing around corners. The project is focused on the phenomenological and technical study, evaluation, and development of methods, signal processing, and system solutions for highresolution microwave systems. The project participates in the recently started NATO group Advancing Sensing Through the Walls Technologies, which includes the countries USA, Canada, France, Norway, Turkey, and Sweden. The group is directed towards studying methods and techniques that reduce false alarms and increase the detection capability, and here feature extraction is a central faculty. Through the participation FOI gains access to important information of on-going research and to measurement data from the common measurement campaign which will be carried out in 2011. The project also takes part in a bilateral co-operation with the French ONERA aiming at the investigation and development of methods and techniques for wall penetrating radar. In this cooperation wall penetrating measurements have been performed of a moving person in a closed room. These measurements have been analysed and various detection methods have been tested with good result. We point to the possibility of automatic detection of human movements down to breathing movements. The various movements display different characteristics, which raises hopes for it to be possible to establish what kind of activity is taking place behind the wall. Antenna solutions and signal processing methods for imaging, penetrating radar systems have been evaluated in the project. A conclusion drawn is that electronically switched array antennas for 3D imaging can be shaped with consideration to the requirements on portable, light, and cheap radar systems with a low energy consumption. In a NATO related work the possibility of using polarimetric wave-forms is being investigated, with a view to improving the detection performance against a human target. An experimental, fully polarimetric measurement of a person behind a wall has been carried out in the project. To our knowledge, this is the first time ever that such a measurement has been made. A preliminary image analysis has revealed that the use of different transmit/receive polarizations will give noticeably better radar contrast between a human target and the surroundings, compared to equal polarizations. The method, introduced by FOI, of using radar for the detection of human movement behind corners has been incorporated into the activities of the project, starting this year. The measurements in a realistic environment, performed this year, show that a radar is able to detect a person moving in the near-range behind a corner by means of the Doppler effect, using reflections in an opposite wall. We are also investigating, using knowledge of the scattering environment, the possibility to determine the position of and to track a person in locomotion by combining the Doppler information obtained from the contributions from diffraction and multiple reflections. We have this year demonstrated that the multiple scattering in a known environment raises the possibilities of both more certain positioning and detection. The next step is to store target indications between different time steps, in this way to approach a tracking algorithm. Calculations show that an array antenna and SAR processing technique enable higher resolution compared to a corresponding traditional antenna of the same dimension.