We address the problem of detecting building dominant scatterers using a reduced number of measurements with applications to through-the-wall radar (TWR) and urban sensing. We consider oblique illumination, which specially enhances the radar returns from the corners formed by the orthogonal intersection of two walls. This letter uses a novel type of image descriptor, named correlogram, which encodes information about spatial correlation of complex amplitudes of each TWR image pixel. The proposed technique compares the known correlogram of the scattering response of an isolated canonical corner reflector with the correlogram of the received radar signal. The feature-based nature of the proposed detector enables corner separation from other indoor scatterers, such as humans. © 2004-2012 IEEE.

Peer Reviewed