A novel target state detection method for accurate cardiopulmonary signal extraction based on FMCW radar signals

Front Physiol. 2023 Jun 26:14:1206471. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2023.1206471. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Frequency-modulated continuous wave radar is capable of constant, real-time detection of human presence and monitoring of cardiopulmonary signals such as respiration and heartbeat. In highly cluttered environments or when the human body moves randomly, noise signals may be relatively large in some range bins, making it crucial to accurately select the range bin containing the target cardiopulmonary signal. In this paper, we propose a target range bin selection algorithm based on a mixed-modal information threshold. We introduce a confidence value in the frequency domain to determine the state of the human target and employ the range bin variance in the time domain to determine the range bin change status of the target. The proposed method accurately detects the state of the target and effectively selects the range bin containing the cardiopulmonary signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better accuracy in cardiopulmonary signal rate estimation. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is lightweight in data processing and has good real-time performance.

Keywords: FMCW radar; cardiopulmonary signal; heart rate; range bin; respiration rate; target state detection.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62101120, 62171123, 62071241) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20210208, BE2022160). This work was partly supported by Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (2022QNRC001) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2242022R40026).