2.1. Radar Signal Model
To apply the proposed method to various low-cost radars, the signal models of two representative short-range radars were assumed to be IR-UWB and FMCW. Using the observation geometry shown in
Figure 1, the methods employed in previous studies [
20,
27] were modified, where
is the radar line-of-sight (RLOS) vector. When there is no body movement, the range vector
of the chest caused by RR is
and the range variation along the RLOS is given by
where · denotes the inner product operator,
denotes the variation of chest skin,
represents the initial phase, and
is the real-time respiration rate, where
denotes the fundamental RR frequency and
represents the slight variation amplitude in the respiration rate responsible for high-order harmonics.
Similarly, the range vector
of the chest caused by the CR is
and its projection
along the RLOS is
where
is the variation in the chest skin,
is the initial phase, and
is the real-time CR function.
For the transmitted signal, we assumed the following functions of the IR-UWB and FMCW radars with bandwidth
B:
where
where
denotes the amplitude,
denotes the Gaussian pulse with
B,
denotes the carrier frequency of the transmitted signal,
, and
denotes the width of the transmitted chirp. The received FMCW signal is compressed into a sinc function by de-chirping and employing a Fourier transform (FT) [
28].
For the chest observed with a given pulse repetition time
, the received signal of the IR-UWB and FMCW radars is expressed as
where
and
for the IR-UWB and FMCW radars, respectively.
is the slow time sampled at
, and the time delay
is
c is the velocity of light, and
is the range variation of the body that should be removed.
is the amplitude of the received signal and can be expressed by the radar equation as follows:
where
and
are the gains of the transmitting and receiving antennas, respectively;
is the wavelength,
is the radar cross section, and
R is the distance to the chest.
is down-converted to baseband signal
as follows:
Assuming
, where
is the initial range and
and
are the velocity and acceleration of the body, respectively, (
11) becomes
2.2. Effect of the Motion of the Rigid Body
The clipped signal
at range
r with maximum energy is a function of
only and contains information on
and
.
is given by
The Fourier transform of
can be expressed as
where
denotes the FT operation, and ⊗ denotes the convolution operation.
As the first component is a constant envelope of one, its effect can be eliminated. The FT of the second exponential component in the above equation is a linear frequency modulation signal due to the acceleration shifted by the Doppler frequency
. Using the stationary phase method [
29], it can be transformed into
where
is a rectangle function,
is the coherent processing interval, and
K is given by
The FT of the third and fourth components can be divided into in-phase and quadrature components as follows:
where
and
are the in-phase and quadrature components of RR, respectively, and
and
are those of CR.
,
,
, and
can be approximated using the Bessel function
of the first type of order
i as follows [
17]:
where
,
, and
for
and
. Notably,
i and
j cannot be zero simultaneously, as they represent the DC component.
Equations (
2), (
4), and (
19)-(
22) represent spectra of RR and CR, composed of harmonics of
and
; as
is higher for smaller
i and RR has a larger
(e.g.,
) than
(e.g.,
),
has the largest amplitude. However, the harmonics of
may have negative effects on
when they coincide with
.
The convolution of the discrete spectra of (
17) and (
18) with the FT of (
15) yielded a distorted spectrum owing to the frequency modulation caused by the acceleration and shift of the modulated spectrum (
Figure 1). In the case where
and
, a peak appears at a false location owing to
, and when
and
, the spectrum can be blurred because of the convolution with the Doppler bandwidth caused by
. With nonzero
and
, the spectrum is severely distorted, as the peaks are both displaced and blurred. Therefore, MOCOM is an indispensable preprocessing step for accurate RRE and CRE.
Eliminating the effect of and using MOCOM is challenging. One probable method is to estimate first by identifying the largest peak in and subsequently focusing the spectrum by finding . However, the exact value of can seldom be found because the shape of the spectrum caused by may not be flat; because of Gibbs’ phenomenon, overshot values can be larger than that at , and the fluctuation of the Doppler bandwidth owing to and the interference by neighboring harmonics makes the spectrum more irregular. Therefore, should not occur in the presence of and .
The problem of finding peaks in the spectrum of
can be solved simply by using the phase information, that is, the arctangent demodulation
of
, given as
where
and
are the in-phase and quadrature components of
, respectively and
is the wavelength of
.
is significantly distorted by
, because it is considerably larger than
and
(
Figure 2). To avoid ambiguity in extracting
, a phase unwrapping technique should be used [
20].
Considering the effects of the surrounding clutter and noise, (
23) is modified as follows:
where
and
are the phases of system noise and background clutter, respectively. As
includes a linear mixture of the effects of the body, noise, and clutter, RRE and CRE become more challenging.
When Fourier transformed,
is the linear component of each component, as follows:
Because
is constant,
has a large amplitude at
. In addition,
and
are the two cosine functions of
and
, respectively, and the peaks can appear at the corresponding frequencies. However, the effect of
should be removed before the FT of
, because it has a very large amplitude (see
Figure 3). In addition, the effects of
and
should be minimized.