Human walking estimation with radar

Abstract

Radar can be used to observe humans that are obscured by objects such as walls. These humans cannot be visually observed. The radar measurements are used to animate an obscured human in virtual reality. This requires detailed information about the motion. The radar measurements give detailed information about the movements of the human body parts; the Doppler signatures are time-varying and observed in the spectrogram. The authors focus on the extraction of parameters and describe a method for estimating human walking parameters from radar measurements. The parameters are estimated by minimising the difference between a simulated model and real measurements. A human walking model is presented which can be used both to calculate the radar response and to visually animate a walking person. The method is applied to real radar measurements of inbound walking humans from a distance of 20 m. The results show that estimation of the walking parameters is possible. The animated walking human generated with estimated parameters is a realistic likeness of the real walking human.