Human Presence Sensing and Gesture Recognition for Smart Home Applications With Moving and Stationary Clutter Suppression Using a 60-GHz Digital Beamforming FMCW Radar

Abstract

With the advancement of radio frequency (RF) assisted smart home technology, it is critical for the RF sensors deployed indoors to isolate the target of interest from unwanted clutter sources. This paper presents a novel method for suppressing both moving and stationary clutters in an indoor environment to localize stationary human subjects with a millimeter-wave frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar. The method derives its roots from the intrinsic high-pass filter (HPF) characteristic of the exponential moving average (EMA) algorithm, a preferred approach for background stationary clutter suppression. In this work, emphasis was laid on expanding the capability to detect and suppress unwanted moving clutter sources in the indoor environment along with stationary clutters, which has not been widely explored before. The proposed method removes motion artifacts so that the characteristic respiratory signal can be identified for human-aware localization. The paper provides experimental validation of the proposed method, wherein a 60-GHz FMCW radar with digital beamforming (DBF) capability was used to identify the 2-D location of a sitting human subject, with a moving window curtain in the background acting as a strong moving clutter source along with other stationary clutters. In addition, a lateral hand gesture recognition technique is presented, wherein the EMA algorithm was used to enhance the signature of the hand motion. The instantaneous position of the hand at the beginning and end of the gesture was determined to classify the gesture as a left-to-right or right-to-left hand swipe.