Micro movement pulsed radar system and method of phase noise compensation

Abstract

A pulsed radar system uses phase noise compensation to reduce phase noise due to drift of the reference oscillator to enable detection of micro movements and particularly human motion such as walking, breathing or heartbeat. The noise level due to A/D sampling must be sufficiently low for the phase noise compensation to be effective. As this is currently beyond state-of-the-art for high bandwidth A/D converters used in traditional receiver design, the receiver is suitably reconfigured to use analog range gates and narrowband A/D sampling having sufficiently low noise level. As technology continues to improve, the phase compensation techniques may be directly applicable to the high bandwidth A/D samples in traditional receiver designs. Whether phase compensation is applied to traditional receiver designs or a receiver configured with analog range gates, the steps are essentially the same: data is processed to position a reference range bin (either an analog range gate or a particular time sample) on a stationary reference and the phase variation of that reference range bin is used to compensate the phase of target data in range bins (either an ensemble of range gates or other time samples) near the stationary reference. This effectively moves the radar system and particularly the reference oscillator to the stationary reference thereby greatly reducing oscillator drift and phase noise and decoupling the stand-off range from the level of phase noise.