Respiration Detection of Ground Injured Human Target Using UWB Radar Mounted on a Hovering UAV

As an important and basic platform for remote life sensing, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may hide the vital signals of an injured human due to their own motion. In this work, a novel method to remove the platform motion and accurately extract human respiration is proposed. We utilized a hovering UAV as the platform of ultra-wideband (UWB) radar to capture human respiration. To remove interference from the moving UAV platform, we used the delay calculated by the correlation between each frame of UWB radar data in order to compensate for the range migration. Then, the echo signals from the human target were extracted as the observed multiple range channel signals. Owing to meeting the independent component analysis (ICA), we adopted ICA to estimate the signal of respiration. The results of respiration detection experiments conducted in two different outdoor scenarios show that our proposed method could accurately separate respiration of a ground human target without any additional sensor and prior knowledge; this physiological information will be essential for search and rescue (SAR) missions.