Quadrature Imbalance Compensation With Ellipse-Fitting Methods for Microwave Radar Physiological Sensing

Accurate displacement measurement using quadrature Doppler radar requires amplitudes and phase imbalance compensation. Previously, this imbalance calibration has required cumbersome hardware modifications and thus can only be performed in a laboratory setting. Recently, a data-based method that does not require hardware modifications has been proposed. This simplifies the calibration process and allows the calibration to be performed on-site periodically. The method is called ellipse fitting. In this paper, the different factors affecting imbalance estimation accuracy, namely, arc length, initial phase angle, and noise level were thoroughly investigated. The Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm is proposed for the first time to increase the estimation accuracy as compared to the previously suggested algebraic fitting. Comprehensive simulations and experimental data show that the algebraic fitting method results in biased estimates. The proposed LM method has also been demonstrated to be more robust to noise, varying arc lengths, and different initial angles. The LM method reaches sufficient imbalance estimation accuracy with an arc length of 40% and a noise level of 1.5%.