Clutter suppression in through-the-wall radar imaging using enhanced delay-and-sum beamformer

Through-the-wall imaging (TWI) is an emerging technology to help human see through walls in various critical situations. Adapting from Radar technology, TWI could be performed through beamforming of an array of ultrawide band (UWB) sensors. One of the challenges in designing a beamformer is to achieve high resolution and low clutter sensitivity. The resolution can be improved by increasing the aperture length at the expense of an increase in clutter sensitivity. An improved version of the standard delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformer, or EDAS has been developed and tested to suppress the clutter. An experiment has been performed and then images were reconstructed using DAS and EDAS. Comparison of the Target Clutter Ratio (TCR) of the images shows that EDAS had improved the TCR significantly.