Principal Investigator: Prof. Tareq Al Naffouri
Poster Presenter: Vijith Varma
Lab: Information Science Lab
This work addresses the challenges involved in Doppler frequency estimation in Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar when multiple targets are present at different locations, and each target introduces two distinct Doppler shifts with substantial difference in their signal amplitudes. Such situations commonly arise in radar-based vital sign monitoring applications. Due to the proximity of the heart and lungs within the same range bin, combined with their substantial size difference, leads to potential signal masking where the reflected signal from the heart may be overshadowed by the dominant lung signal. Consequently, extracting information related to heart rate becomes a challenging task. In this work, initially, targets present at different ranges and angular locations are localized by employing the Capon method. Subsequently, we propose a novel Capon-like method to accurately extract Doppler frequencies corresponding to each target. The Doppler frequencies are directly proportional to the movement of the heart and chest and can be exploited to estimate heart and breathing rates.