Demonstration of the ultra-high-resolution through-wall radar developed at DGIST. Photo: International iJournal.
DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology), led by President Shin Sung-chul, announced on June 30 that a research team headed by Senior Researcher Dae-gun Oh of the Robotics Systems Research Division, under Division Head Jong-hoon Lee, had developed Korea’s first ultra-high-resolution through-wall radar. The system can detect targets behind walls or other obstacles in real time.
From its underlying principles and core module design to radar implementation and performance evaluation, the ultra-high-resolution through-wall radar was developed entirely with domestic technology.
The radar’s underlying technology uses a multidimensional shift-invariant structure based on array processing. This achieves higher resolution than conventional through-wall radar systems.
Another feature is a newly proposed low-complexity, ultra-high-resolution range-estimation algorithm that minimizes computation and enables real-time radar operation even on constrained embedded systems.
By applying this original ultra-high-resolution technology to a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) through-wall radar, the team succeeded in detecting targets hidden behind walls with an error of no more than several centimeters. According to the announcement, this represented a first in Korea.
Because the technology can serve civilian as well as defense applications, the team expected it to have significant potential for wider adoption.
Until then, through-wall radars had mainly been used in military counterterrorism operations to determine the position of hostile personnel inside buildings. The researchers anticipated that such systems could eventually also support disaster response and public safety, helping rescuers rapidly locate people trapped within structures such as reinforced concrete buildings.
Senior Researcher Oh said that through-wall radar was already being actively researched worldwide, but work on ultra-high-resolution through-wall radar remained at an early stage. He added that DGIST’s success in developing the underlying technology could put the institute in a leading position in the international through-wall radar field.
Results concerning the multidimensional shift-invariant structure and the low-complexity ultra-high-resolution algorithm were published in two papers in the May issue of IEEE Communications Letters. Senior Researcher Dae-gun Oh was the lead author, and Jong-hoon Lee, head of the Robotics Systems Research Division, was the corresponding author.
The work received support through DGIST’s institutional research program and the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning’s Future Brain Researcher Start-up Program.
