Vibration Measurement Method for Artificial Structure Based on MIMO Imaging Radar

Measuring the vibrating states of an artificial structure is an important approach to monitor the stability of the structure. However, the existing radar vibration measurement methods do not have enough azimuth resolution for measuring the vibrations in a relatively large scene, which contains multiple buildings or a large building. For such application scene, this paper proposes a vibration measurement method based on multiple-input multiple-output imaging radar system, which can achieve high azimuth resolution. Features of the proposed method are threefold: first of all, by utilizing the ability of quickly acquiring imaging data, the proposed method can achieve vibration measurement for the entire area simultaneously; second, in order to detect the positions of vibrating objects and decrease the time of vibration parameter estimation part, this paper proposes vibration similarity index to quantify the similarity between the detected signal and ideal vibration signal; at last, due to the limitations of the hardware performance, this paper adopts multiple signal classification least-squares estimation method to estimate the vibrating frequency and amplitude. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, ideal point target simulation and vibrating calibrator experiment have been conducted, and the results show that the positions and the vibrating parameters of the vibrating objects fit well with the reference values. In addition, car experiment and bridge experiment have been carried out to verify the ability of the proposed method to measure the vibration of real artificial structures, which cannot be seen as point targets.