A Wall-clutter Suppression Method Based on Spatial Signature in Mimo Through-the- Wall Radar Imaging

In through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI), wall returns are often stronger than target returns, which make the targets behind walls invisible in the radar image. Spatial filtering that relies on the removal of the spatial zero-frequency components is a useful way for wall-clutter mitigation. Unfortunately, it applies to through-the-wall radar (TWR) with synthetic aperture array only. In this paper, a method based on spatial signature is proposed to suppress the wallclutter in multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) TWRI. Firstly, the traditional spatial filtering method is discussed, as well as the reasons for the inapplicability for MIMO TWR. Secondly, the wall and target spatial signatures based on MIMO array are analyzed, respectively. The results indicate that the former has stability and symmetry, whereas the latter not. Thirdly, according to the above differences, a new method, symmetry subtraction, is applied to describe the wallclutter suppression procedure. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in mitigating the wall returns and highlighting the targets.