Experimental Verification of Human Being Detection Dependency on Operational UWB Frequency Band

The study investigates the effect of bandwidth and centre frequency of UWB radars on detection and resolvability of trapped victims. The study is limited to two person-under-test (PUTs) and does not set forth to perform statistical evaluation, but instead provides rough figures on appropriate frequency band to be used for human being detection purposes. It has been shown that for all considered cases, SNR increases with operational bandwidth and centre frequency and reaches its optimal values between 2-2.9 GHz and 4.5-6 GHz, respectively. HH antenna co-polarization is the preferred one, since it generally produces equal or higher SNR values than VV antenna co-polarization. The results show that it is easier to detect a standing victim; however such scenarios are not very likely occur in real-life conditions. It has been found that if a breathing human is blocking the propagation path of the human target response of another breathing human, the human target response of the latter is heavily attenuated (around 17 dB) and thus only the closer breathing human is detected. This study could, thus, not perform the down-range resolution assessment, as intended. Nevertheless, it demonstrated clearly that there is a need for multi-static radar configuration for increased probability of detection of trapped victims.