UWB Radar Features for Distinguishing Humans From Animals in an Actual Post-Disaster Trapped Scenario

Distinguishing humans from animals using ultra-wideband (UWB) radar is necessary in post-disaster emergency rescues to prioritize and thereby optimize the distribution of labor and material resources. However, current studies are few and have only been implemented in simple laboratory environments, such that the effectiveness of these approaches cannot be guaranteed in rescue situations. This study describes experiments under actual post-disaster emergency rescue scenarios, for which the signal-to-noise ratio of UWB radar is seriously degraded owing to multipath effects and a complicated ruin environment. Four distinguishing features are extracted from aspects of wavelet entropy, correlation coefficient, and energy to classify humans from animals. Analysis of feature effectiveness showed that each feature could identify humans from animals individually. The largest difference between humans and animals was found in a feature which combines advantages of the correlation coefficient and energy simultaneously. There was no overlap between the human and animal values for this feature among the 20 sets of radar data collected. This is the first attempt to distinguish humans from animals in an actual post-disaster trapped condition, and it yielded four features of strong classification ability. We envision this study to advance real-world applicability of UWB radar in post-disaster emergency rescue.