Ultra Wideband Wall Compensation for Through-wall Tracking and Imaging

One of the interesting promises of Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology is its ability to penetrate walls and obstacles. However, as the signal propagates through these obstacles, it gets attenuated and dispersed. This work presents techniques for wall compensation for through-wall tracking and imaging. Knowledge of the walls obtained from wall characterization measurements is used to improve the positioning accuracy of a target located behind a wall using three proposed compensation methods. In these three methods, the insertion transfer function of the wall is represented with constant amplitude and delay, frequency dependent data, or using data fitting methods. The compensated position of the target is more accurate than the uncompensated one. Results from this work provide insight on how to develop algorithms for effective target position estimation in imaging and localization applications. They are also useful for channel modeling and link budget analysis.