Penetrating radar systems for urban operations – Final report
Publish date: 2011-12-22
Report number: FOI-R--3317--SE
Pages: 36
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 final report gives an account for the activities carried out and the results produced in the three-year Swedish Armed Forces' project Penetrating Radar Systems for Urban Operations. The project is concerned with 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 Dopplerbased as well as imaging wall-penetrating radar systems. Wall-penetrating measurements of a moving person in a closed room have been analysed and various detection methods with possible real-time performance have been tested with good result. We point to the possibility of automatic detection of human movements down to breathing ones. The target tracks created by the movement detections look different, depending on the activity of the person. This gives hope that it will be possible to use the characteristic appearance of the tracks to decide what type of activity is taking place behind the wall. The project finances participation in the NATO group Advancing Sensing Through the Walls Technologies (2009-2012), which includes the countries Sweden, USA, Canada, France, Norway, and Turkey. The group studies methods and techniques that increase the detection capability, and here feature extraction is a central faculty. Through the participation, FOI gains access to important information about on-going research. 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 imaging 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. Our image analysis shows that the radar contrast between a human target object and the surroundings depends on the polarization choice in the transmitting and the receiving antenna. In order to investigate if automatic discrimination between a human and various other objects is possible we have tested a type of classification scheme that is used in polarimetric SAR in remote sensing applications. The results are promising but not quite unambiguous, and the combined conclusion is that the work with polarimetric radar technique should continue. The method, introduced by FOI, of using radar for the detection of human movement behind corners has since last year formed part of the project activities. The measurements in a realistic environment, performed in 2010, show that radar detection of a person moving in the near-range behind a corner by means of the Doppler effect, using reflections in an opposite wall, is possible. We have also investigated, 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 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, as a development towards a tracking algorithm. This work has begun. Furthermore, we have done simulation calculations showing that an array antenna and SAR processing technique enable higher resolution compared to a corresponding traditional antenna of the same dimension. Within this project, FOI is establishing a deepened system competence and has developed an evaluation methodology for wall penetrating systems which contribute to supporting the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) and Armed Forces (FM) in future evaluation commissions. In 2011, controlled experimental system tests were carried out on two commercial systems. A state-of-the-art survey showed that the number of manufactures of operative wall penetrating systems have grown in recent years. The development is divided into to tracks; advanced imaging systems and simpler systems for motion detection.