Enhanced WiFi-based passive ISAR for indoor and outdoor surveillance

In this paper we examine the potentiality of passive coherent location (PCL) exploiting WiFi transmissions for indoor and outdoor area monitoring. Particularly, we investigate the advanced capability to obtain high resolution cross-range profiles of the observed targets via Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) techniques. To these purposes, appropriate processing techniques are introduced and their effectiveness is tested against real data sets concerning both human and man-made targets. The reported results clearly show that the proposed technique allows to effectively discriminate closely spaced human targets moving in a hall, whereas they could not be resolved by a conventional processing. In addition reliable and stable profiles are obtained for the man-made targets moving in the surveyed scene which might fruitfully feed a classification stage. This contributes to demonstrate the effective applicability of the passive radar concept for improving internal and external security of private/public premises. © 2015 IEEE.