UWB radar for target detection: DCT versus matched filter approaches

In this paper, we study sense-through-foliage target detection using ultra-wideband (UWB) radar. We propose a Discrete-Cosine-Transform (DCT)-based approach for sense-through-foliage target detection when the echo signal quality is good. We compared our approach with the ideal case when both echos are available, i.e., echos with target and without target. We also compared our approach against the scheme in which 2-D image was created via adding voltages with the appropriate time offset as well as the matched filter-based approach. We observed that the matched filter-based couldn´t work well because the UWB channel has memory. Simulation results show that our DCT-based scheme works much better than the existing approaches.