Clutter removal in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) B-scan data has been widely studied in recent years. In this letter, we propose a novel data-driven clutter suppression method in GPR data based on conditional generative adversarial nets (cGANs). The proposed method learns a function that maps the cluttered data to the clutter-free data from the training set. The training set consists of pairs of cluttered data and corresponding clutter-free data. Different from the traditional method that only uses the simulation training set, we simulate the clutter-free data and add the real collected non-target data to the simulated clutter-free data as cluttered data, so that the trained network can generalize well to the real GPR data. The proposed method is compared with the subspace method, sparse representation-based method, and low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition (LRSD) methods on both simulation data and real collected data. The results show that the proposed method has higher performance in terms of computational complexity, clutter suppression results, and applicability than those state-of-the-art methods.

For fine-grained human perception tasks such as pose estimation and activity recognition, radar-based sensors show advantages over optical cameras in low-visibility, privacy-aware, and wall-occlusive environments. Radar transmits radio frequency signals to irradiate the target of interest and store the target information in the echo signals. One common approach is to transform the echoes into radar images and extract the features with convolutional neural networks. This article introduces RadarFormer, the first method that introduces the self-attention (SA) mechanism to perform human perception tasks directly from radar echoes. It bypasses the imaging algorithm and realizes end-to-end signal processing. Specifically, we give constructive proof that processing radar echoes using the SA mechanism is at least as expressive as processing radar images using the convolutional layer. On this foundation, we design RadarFormer, which is a Transformer-like model to process radar signals. It benefits from the fast-/slow-time SA mechanism considering the physical characteristics of radar signals. RadarFormer extracts human representations from radar echoes and handles various downstream human perception tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art radar-based methods both in performance and computational cost and obtains accurate human perception results even in dark and occlusive environments.

The 3D object detector usually uses a framework similar to 2D detection and benefits from the advancements of 2D detection tasks. In these frameworks, it is necessary to make the unstructured, sparse point cloud features into dense grids to be compatible with popular 2D operators such as convolution and transformers, which also causes extra computational costs. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient Fully Sparse TRansformer (FSTR) for LiDAR-based 3D object detection, which is able to combine with state-of-the-art sparse backbones to form a fully sparse, end-to-end, simple, and efficient detection framework. FSTR uses the sparse voxel feature from the sparse backbone as the input token without any custom operators. Further, we introduce the dynamic queries to provide a priori location and context of the foreground for the decoder and drop the high-confidence background tokens to further reduce redundant computations. We propose Gaussian denoising queries to speed up the decoder training and make it more adaptable to the distribution of sparse voxel features. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark and the Argoverse2 benchmark validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. FSTR outperforms all LiDAR real-time methods by 69.5 mAP and 72.9 NDS on the official benchmark of nuScenes dataset. On the long-range detection benchmark Argoverse2, the proposed method achieves a new state-of-art performance of 39.9 mAP which outperforms the existing LiDAR detectors, even the LiDAR-Camera detectors by a large margin (+9.4 mAP and +7.5mAP), showing the great advantage of the proposed method for long-range detection.

Low imaging spatial resolution hinders through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI) from reconstructing complete human postures. This letter mainly discusses a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based human posture reconstruction method for TWRI. The training process follows a supervision-prediction learning pipeline inspired by the cross-modal learning technique. Specifically, optical images and TWRI signals are collected simultaneously using a self-develop radar containing an optical camera. Then, the optical images are processed with a computer-vision-based supervision network to generate ground-truth human skeletons. Next, the same type of skeleton is predicted from corresponding TWRI signals using a prediction network. After training, the model shows complete predictions in wall-occlusive scenarios solely using TWRI signals. Experiments show comparable quantitative results with the state-of-the-art vision-based methods in nonwall-occlusive scenarios and accurate qualitative results with wall occlusion.

Although the through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI) system working in the appropriate frequency band can penetrate the nonmetallic obstacles and sense the targets behind, its low imaging spatial resolution hinders the acquisition of more detailed information, such as human pose and shape. This article mainly discusses a deep learning-based human pose and shape recovery method from TWRI images. Inspired by cross-modal learning, the method follows a teacher–student learning pipeline that avoids the heavy cost of manual labeling. Specifically, a camera is attached to the self-develop radar system to simultaneously capture paired red-green-blue (RGB) images and TWRI images in a scenario without wall occlusion. A pose estimation framework (Hourglass) and a semantic segmentation framework (UNet) serve as the teacher network to convert the RGB images into the pose keypoints and the shape masks. By taking inspiration from the topological architecture of these frameworks, a student network radar pose shape network (RPSNet) is designed to extract the information from the corresponding radar images and predict the keypoints and masks that are close to the results above. Instead of learning two single-task objectives independently, multitasking learning is introduced to adaptatively learn common features. When applied to wall-occlusive scenarios, only the radar images are collected and fed into the student network for pose and shape recovery. The advantages of this method over computer vision-based methods for human recovery are demonstrated in scenarios both without and with wall occlusion.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radar is widely used for through-wall human detection due to its high-range resolution and high penetration capability. UWB impulse radar can detect human targets in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, mainly based on the chest motion caused by human respiration. The automatic detection and extraction of multiple stationary human targets is still a challenge. Missed alarms often exist if the detection method is based on the energy of the human target. This is mainly because factors such as the range of the target, the intensity of the respiratory movement, and the shadow effect will make a difference between the energy scattered by targets. Weak targets are easily masked by strong targets and thus cannot be detected. Therefore, in this paper, a multiple stationary human targets detection method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) in through-wall UWB impulse radar is proposed. After performing the signal-to-clutter-and-noise ratio (SCNR) enhancement method on the raw radar data, the range-slow-time matrix is fed into a six-layer CNN. Benefiting from the powerful feature extraction capability of CNN, the target point of interest (TPOI) can be extracted from the data matrix. The clustering algorithm is used to simplify the TPOIs to achieve accurate detection of multiple targets behind the wall. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the experimental data.