Penetrating detection and recognition of behind wall indoor human activities has drawn great attentions from social security and emergency service department in recent years since intelligent surveillance aforehand could avail the proper decision making before operations being carried out. However, due to the influence of the wall effects, the obtained micro-Doppler signatures would be severely degenerated by strong near zero-frequency DC components, which would inevitably smear the detailed characteristic features of different behind wall motions in time-frequency (TF) map and further hinder the motion recognition and classification. In this paper, an ultra-wideband (UWB) radar system is first employed to probe through the opaque wall to detect the behind wall motions, which often span a certain number of range bin cells. By employing such a system, a high resolution range map can be obtained, in which the embedded rich range information is expected to be fully exploited to improve the subsequent recognition and classification performance. Secondly, a high-pass filter is applied to remove the effect of the wall in the raw range map. Then, with the aim of enhancing the characteristic features of different behind wall motions in TF maps, a novel range-max enhancement strategy is proposed to extract the most significant micro-Doppler feature of each TF cell along all range bins for a specific motion. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed micro-Doppler signature enhancement strategy is investigated by means of onsite experiments and comparative classification. Both the feature enhanced TF maps and classification results show that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-art Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) based TF feature extraction methods.
This article presents a new approach for the wireless clock synchronization of Decawave ultra-wideband transceivers based on the time difference of arrival. The presented techniques combine the time-of-arrival and time-difference-of-arrival measurements without losing the advantages of each approach. The precision and accuracy of the distances measured by the Decawave devices depends on three effects: signal power, clock drift, and uncertainty in the hardware delay. This article shows how all three effects may be compensated with both measurement techniques.
Doppler radar systems enable unobtrusive and privacy-preserving long-term monitoring of human motions indoors. In particular, a person's gait can provide important information about their state of health. Utilizing micro-Doppler signatures, we show that radar is capable of detecting small differences between the step motions of the two legs, which results in asymmetric gait. Image-based and physical features are extracted from the radar return signals of several individuals, including four persons with different diagnosed gait disorders. It is shown that gait asymmetry is correctly detected wi…
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), Indoor Positioning System (IPS) has attracted significant interest in academic research. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is an emerging technology that can be employed for IPS as it offers centimetre-level accuracy. However, the UWB system still faces several technical challenges in practice, one of which is Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) signal propagation. Several machine learning approaches have been applied for the NLoS component identification. However, when the data contains a very small amount of NLoS components it becomes very difficult for ex…
DoDTrack: Indoor Mobile Devices Tracking via Difference-of-Doppler
College of Semiconductors, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学半导体学院）；Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学电子电气工程系）；The Future Network of Intelligence Institute (FNii), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）未来网络智能研究院）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become an appealing solution for a wide range of commercial and civilian applications because of its high mobility and flexible deployment. Due to the continuous UAV navigation, the channel between UAV and base station (BS) is subject to the Doppler effect. Meanwhile, when the BS is equipped with massive number of antennas, the non-negligible propagation delay across the array aperture would cause beam squint effect. In this paper, we first investigate the channel of UAV communications under both Doppler shift effect and beam squint effect. Then, we design a g…
Extensive work has demonstrated the excellent performance of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation in high-mobility scenarios. Time-variant wideband channel estimation serves as one of the key compositions of OTFS receivers since the data detection requires accurate channel state information (CSI). In practical wideband OTFS systems, the Doppler shift brought by the high mobility is frequency-dependent, which is referred to as the Doppler Squint Effect (DSE). Unfortunately, DSE was ignored in overall prior estimation schemes employed in OTFS systems, which leads to severe performan…
Generalizable Indoor Human Activity Recognition Method Based on Micro-Doppler Corner Point Cloud and Dynamic Graph Learning
School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子学院）；Jiaxing Research Center of Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学嘉兴研究院）；Key Laboratory of Electronic and Information Technology in Satellite Navigation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学卫星导航电子信息技术重点实验室）
This study presents the progress of our recent research regarding wireless measurements of the human body. First, we explain radar imaging algorithms for screening passengers at security checkpoints that can process data faster than existing algorithms to generate accurate and high-resolution images of human bodies. Second, we introduce signal processing techniques for accurately measuring radar micro-Doppler signals associated with human motions and activities. Finally, we present radar signal processing algorithms for measuring human respiration, heartbeat, and other types of motion. Such al…
In this work, we investigate the use of backscattered mm-wave radio signals for the joint tracking and recognition of identities of humans as they move within indoor environments. We build a system that effectively works with multiple persons concurrently sharing and freely moving within the same indoor space. This leads to a complicated setting, which requires one to deal with the randomness and complexity of the resulting (composite) backscattered signal. The proposed system combines several processing steps: at first, the signal is filtered to remove artifacts, reflections and random noise …
State-of-the-art device-free localization systems infer presence and location of users based on received signal strength measurements of line-of-sight links in wireless networks. In this letter, we propose to enhance device-free localization systems by exploiting multipath propagation between the individual network nodes. Particularly indoors, wireless propagation channels are characterized by multipath propagation, i.e., received signals comprise multipath components due to reflection and scattering. Given prior information about the surrounding environment, e.g., a floor plan, the individual…
We derive new expressions for the connection probability and the average ergodic capacity to evaluate the performance achieved by multi-connectivity (MC) in an indoor ultra-wideband terahertz (THz) communication system. In this system, the user is affected by both self-blockage and dynamic human blockers. We first build up a three-dimensional propagation channel in this system to characterize the impact of molecular absorption loss and the shrinking usable bandwidth nature of the ultra-wideband THz channel. We then carry out new performance analysis for two MC strategies: 1) Closest line-of-si…
Ultra wideband technology has shown great promise for providing high-quality location estimation, even in complex indoor multipath environments, but existing ultra wideband systems require tens to hundreds of milliwatts during operation. Backscatter communication has demonstrated the viability of astonishingly low-power tags, but has thus far been restricted to narrowband systems with low localization resolution. The challenge to combining these complimentary technologies is that they share a compounding limitation, constrained transmit power. Regulations limit ultra wideband transmissions to …
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Ghent University（根特大学）；imec（比利时微电子研究中心）
Frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar is a promising sensor technology for indoor drones as it provides range, angular as well as Doppler-velocity information about obstacles in the environment. Recently, deep learning approaches have been proposed for processing FMCW data, outperforming traditional detection techniques on range-Doppler or range-azimuth maps. However, these techniques come at a cost; for each novel task a deep neural network architecture has to be trained on high-dimensional input data, stressing both data bandwidth and processing budget. In this paper, we investiga…
This paper considers human activity classification for an indoor radar system. Human motions generate nonstationary radar returns which represent Doppler and micro-Doppler signals. The time-frequency (TF) analysis of micro-Doppler signals can discern subtle variations on the motion by precisely revealing velocity components of various moving body parts. We consider radar for activity monitoring using TF-based machine learning approach exploiting both temporal and spatial degrees of freedom. The proposed approach captures different human motion representations more vividly in joint-variable dat…
Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems are becoming increasingly popular for indoor localization, where range measurements are obtained by measuring the time-of-flight of radio signals. However, the range measurements typically suffer from a systematic error or bias that must be corrected for high-accuracy localization. In this paper, a ranging protocol is proposed alongside a robust and scalable antenna-delay calibration procedure to accurately and efficiently calibrate antenna delays for many UWB tags. Additionally, the bias and uncertainty of the measurements are modelled as a function of the receive…
Ultra-wideband (UWB) is the state-of-the-art and most popular technology for wireless localization. Nevertheless, precise ranging and localization in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions is still an open research topic. Indeed, multipath effects, reflections, refractions, and complexity of the indoor radio environment can easily introduce a positive bias in the ranging measurement, resulting in highly inaccurate and unsatisfactory position estimation. This article proposes an efficient representation learning methodology that exploits the latest advancement in deep learning and graph optimizati…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Defence Research and Development Canada（加拿大国防研究与发展中心）
Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is one of the key technologies empowering the Internet of Thing (IoT) concept to perform reliable, energy-efficient, and highly accurate monitoring, screening, and localization in indoor environments. Performance of UWB-based localization systems, however, can significantly degrade because of Non Line of Sight (NLoS) connections between a mobile user and UWB beacons. To mitigate the destructive effects of NLoS connections, we target development of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) anchor selection framework that can efficiently cope with the dynamic nature of indoor environmen…
Randomized Stepped Frequency Radar (RSFR) is very attractive for tasks under complex electromagnetic environment. Due to the synthetic high range resolution in RSRFs, a target usually occupies a series of range cells and is called an extended target. To reconstruct the range-Doppler information in a RSFR, previous studies based on sparse recovery mainly exploit the sparsity of the target scene but do not adequately address the extended-target characteristics, which exist in many practical applications. Block sparsity, which combines the sparsity and the target extension, better characterizes a…
In this article, we discuss the potential of radio frequency (RF) lens for ultra-wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. In terms of the beam squint, we compare the proposed RF lens antenna with the phase shifter-based array for hybrid beamforming. To reduce the complexities for fully digital beamforming, researchers have come up with RF lens-based hybrid beamforming. The use of mmWave systems, however, causes an increase in bandwidth, which gives rise to the beam squint phenomenon. We first find the causative factors for beam squint in the dielectric RF lens antenna. Based on the beamformi…
Through-the-Wall Radar Human Activity Micro-Doppler Signature Representation Method Based on Joint Boulic-Sinusoidal Pendulum Model
School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子学院）；Jiaxing Research Center of Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学嘉兴研究院）；Key Laboratory of Electronic and Information Technology in Satellite Navigation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学卫星导航电子信息技术重点实验室）
The increasing popularity of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology for location-based services, such as access control and real-time indoor track&tracing, as well as UWB support in new consumer devices such as smartphones, has resulted in the availability of multiple new UWB radio chips. However, due to this increase in UWB device availability, the question of which (industry) standards and configuration factors impact UWB interoperability and compatibility becomes increasingly important. In this paper, the fundamentals of UWB compatibility are investigated by first giving an overview of different U…
Radar based assisted living has received great amount of research interest in recent years. By employing the micro-Doppler features of indoor human motions, accurate recognition and classification of different types of movements become possible. Whereas, most of the existing works are focused only on free space detection, the literature on detection and recognition of human motions in through-the-wall scenarios is still in its infancy. As can be anticipated, the wall media and indoor static non-human targets would cause clutters and significantly corrupt the motion information of human subject…
Free-space optical (FSO) communications has the potential to revolutionize wireless communications due to its advantages of inherent security, high-directionality, high available bandwidth and small physical footprint. The effects of atmospheric turbulence currently limit the performance of FSO communications. In this letter, we demonstrate a system capable of indiscriminately suppressing the atmospheric phase noise encountered by independent optical signals spread over a range of 7.2 THz (encompassing the full optical C-Band), by actively phase stabilizing a primary optical signal at 193.1 TH…
Narrowband and broadband indoor radar images significantly deteriorate in the presence of target dependent and independent static and dynamic clutter arising from walls. A stacked and sparse denoising autoencoder (StackedSDAE) is proposed for mitigating wall clutter in indoor radar images. The algorithm relies on the availability of clean images and corresponding noisy images during training and requires no additional information regarding the wall characteristics. The algorithm is evaluated on simulated Doppler-time spectrograms and high range resolution profiles generated for diverse radar f…
Detection and interpretation of human activities have emerged as a challenging healthcare problem in areas such as assisted living and remote monitoring. Besides traditional approaches that rely on wearable devices and camera systems, WiFi based technologies are evolving as a promising solution for indoor monitoring and activity recognition. This is, in part, due to the pervasive nature of WiFi in residential settings such as homes and care facilities, and unobtrusive nature of WiFi based sensing. Advanced signal processing techniques can accurately extract WiFi channel status information (CSI…
This paper presents a comprehensive dataset intended to evaluate passive Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and localization techniques with measurements obtained from synchronized Radio-Frequency (RF) devices and vision-based sensors. The dataset consists of RF data including Channel State Information (CSI) extracted from a WiFi Network Interface Card (NIC), Passive WiFi Radar (PWR) built upon a Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform, and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) signals acquired via commercial off-the-shelf hardware. It also consists of vision/Infra-red based data acquired from Kinect sensors. Appr…
Center for Advanced Communication, Villanova University（维拉诺瓦大学先进通信中心）；Comcast Labs, Comcast（康卡斯特实验室（康卡斯特公司））；Villanova University（维拉诺瓦大学）；Comcast（康卡斯特公司）
Radar for indoor monitoring is an emerging area of research and development, covering and supporting different health and wellbeing applications of smart homes, assisted living, and medical diagnosis. We report on a successful RF sensing system for home monitoring applications. The system recognizes Activities of Daily Living(ADL) and detects unique motion characteristics, using data processing and training algorithms. We also examine the challenges of continuously monitoring various human activities which can be categorized into translation motions (active mode) and in-place motions (resting …
