Rebar Clutter Suppression Method Based on Range Migration Compensation and Low-Rank and Sparse Decomposition

Through-the-wall radar (TWR) is commonly employed for indoor target imaging and detection. However, the targets' echoes are often whelmed by the reflected waves of the wall and the rebars inside. Since the shape of clutter caused by rebars is similar to the target echo in B-scan, the performance of many clutter suppression methods in the literature degrades severely. Aiming at the problem of rebar clutter removal, this article proposes a rebar clutter suppression method based on range migration compensation and low-rank and sparse decomposition with total variation regularization. In the proposed method, the Hough transform is used to locate the rebars after removing the reflected waves of the wall. Then, the rebars' echoes are transformed into a horizontal line by range migration compensation in order to make it in a low-rank subspace. Based on the model of low-rank sparse decomposition and total variation regularization, the target matrix is extracted. Finally, inverse range migration is performed to obtain the target signal. Numerical simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in terms of target-to-clutter ratio (TCR).