Clutter Reduction and Target Tracking in Through-the-Wall Radar

This article addresses the problem of tracking targets behind the wall using through-the-wall radar. To that end, the wall reflection, i.e., clutter, must be eliminated first because it interferes with the subsequent image formation operation. The low-rank of the clutter and sparseness of the useful signal are utilized to devise a joint low-rank and sparse framework to simultaneously suppress the clutter and recover the target returns, where alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) approach is developed to solve the corresponding optimization. Since then, an effective observation window scheme is proposed to locate the target and further to facilitate the tracking process. The tracking is finally provided by Kalman filter and particle filter. The numerical studies are provided to demonstrate that the performance of the proposed framework is superior to that of other methods in terms of clutter removal and tracking accuracy.