Application of a Microstrip Leaky Wave Antenna for Range–Azimuth Tracking of Humans

We investigate the use of a simple microstrip leaky wave antenna (MLWA) as a radar front end to achieve range-azimuth tracking of humans. The frequency-scanned beam of the MLWA and its frequency bandwidth during the beam dwell are exploited to achieve simultaneous bearing estimation and ranging within a single frequency sweep. As a result, 2-D range-azimuth images can be readily generated with a high refresh rate. The radar processing algorithm is developed and tested using point scatterer simulations. Stationary trihedral and human tracking measurements are carried out to demonstrate the concept. In addition, an L1-norm minimization algorithm is applied to improve the resulting resolution.