In homeland security and law enforcement situations, it is often required to remotely detect human targets obscured by walls and barriers. In particular, we are specifically interested in scenarios that involve a human whose torso is stationary. We propose a technique to detect and characterize activity associated with a stationary human in through-the-wall scenarios using a Doppler radar system. The presence of stationary humans is identified by detecting Doppler signatures resulting from breathing, and movement of the human arm and wrist. The irregular, transient, non-uniform, and non-stationary nature of human activity presents a number of challenges in extracting and classifying Doppler signatures from the signal. These are addressed using bio-mechanical human arm movement models and the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm for Doppler feature extraction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to extract Doppler signatures corresponding to human activity through walls using a 750-MHz Doppler radar system.
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