Experimental through-the-wall detection in cluttered environment using time reversal processing

The detection and localization of persons through obstacles is becoming a great stake in both civil and military fields. One of the most important applications is certainly sensing through walls which can be very useful in safety, peace-keeping and law enforcement operations. Radar systems are likely to provide an adequate answer to this kind of problem and various processing methods are nowadays studied and considered to reach the final solution. In this paper, we focus on ultra-wideband radar techniques applied to human sensing. In particular, we assume that we have an antenna array on reception. Many signal processing methods can be considered for target localization. We choose to focus on an emerging method in electromagnetic detection field, especially in a cluttered environment: time-reversal [1] adapted here to through-the-wall localization. In this work time reversal processing is applied to experimental data to demonstrate the localization of dielectric objects behind a 10 cm thick brick wall.