Human activity signatures captured under different directions using SISO and MIMO radar systems

In this paper, we highlight and resolve the shortcomings of single-input single-output (SISO) millimeter wave (mm-Wave) radar systems for human activity recognition (HAR). A 2 × 2 distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar framework is presented to capture human activity signatures under realistic conditions in indoor environments. We propose to distribute the two pairs of collocated transmitter–receiver antennas in order to illuminate the indoor environment from different perspectives. For the proposed MIMO system, we measure the time-variant (TV) radial velocity distribution and TV mean radial velocity to observe the signatures of human activities. We deploy the Ancortek SDR-KIT 2400T2R4 mm-Wave radar in a SISO as well as a 2 × 2 distributed MIMO configuration. We corroborate the limitations of SISO configurations by recording real human activities in different directions. It is shown that, unlike the SISO radar configuration, the proposed MIMO configuration has the ability to obtain superior human activity signatures for all directions. To signify the importance of the proposed 2 × 2 MIMO radar system, we compared the performance of a SISO radar-based passive step counter with a distributed MIMO radar-based passive step counter. As the proposed 2 × 2 MIMO radar system is able to detect human activity in all directions, it fills a research gap of radio frequency (RF)-based HAR systems.