Exploration of Effective Time-Velocity Distribution for Doppler-Radar-Based Personal Gait Identification Using Deep Learning

Personal identification based on radar gait measurement is an important application of biometric technology because it enables remote and continuous identification of people, irrespective of the lighting conditions and subjects’ outfits. This study explores an effective time-velocity distribution and its relevant parameters for Doppler-radar-based personal gait identification using deep learning. Most conventional studies on radar-based gait identification used a short-time Fourier transform (STFT), which is a general method to obtain time-velocity distribution for motion recognition using Doppler radar. However, the length of the window function that controls the time and velocity resolutions of the time-velocity image was empirically selected, and several other methods for calculating high-resolution time-velocity distributions were not considered. In this study, we compared four types of representative time-velocity distributions calculated from the Doppler-radar-received signals: STFT, wavelet transform, Wigner–Ville distribution, and smoothed pseudo-Wigner–Ville distribution. In addition, the identification accuracies of various parameter settings were also investigated. We observed that the optimally tuned STFT outperformed other high-resolution distributions, and a short length of the window function in the STFT process led to a reasonable accuracy; the best identification accuracy was 99% for the identification of twenty-five test subjects. These results indicate that STFT is the optimal time-velocity distribution for gait-based personal identification using the Doppler radar, although the time and velocity resolutions of the other methods were better than those of the STFT.