2016 International Conference on Computer & Communication Engineering
FMCW Radar for Slow Moving Target Detection:
Design and Performance Analysis
Nor Fatin Muhd Ariffin, Farah Nadia Mohd Isa, Ahmad Fadzil Ismail
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
International Islamic University Malaysia,
53100, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
fatin.nornisa@gmail.com, farahn@iium.edu.my, af_ismail@iium.edu.my
Abstract— This paper discusses the design and performance
of a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) Radar
Doppler for slow moving target detection. It is modeled as a low-
cost and feasible radar remote sensor for measuring particular
moving target’s range and velocity. It operates at ISM band with
a center frequency of 2.4GHz, transmit power of approximately
11.3dBm and 52MHz transmit signal bandwidth. The radar also
employs linear FM waveform, bistatic antenna system, and
Doppler mode operation. The radar hardware architecture is
built by assembling off-shelf electronic devices and tested
towards slow moving target in a Microwave Laboratory. The
target that is used to evaluate and analyze the radar performance
is a human body which moves at different speeds over time. The
analysis demonstrates that the proposed radar system capable of
detecting and measuring the target’s velocity and range. Besides,
the radar system demonstrates that it can measure min velocity
of 0.77 m/s for the short range moving target.
Keywords—linear FM; doppler; radar; moving target; IFFT
I. INTRODUCTION
Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar is
commonly used for short range applications such as snow
avalanche monitoring [1], homeland security [2], wireless
channel sound [3] and airport security checkpoint [4].
Previous studies found that the radar is well suited for the
particular applications compared to other conventional radars
as for the following reasons; low false alarm rate, high-
resolution range, low transmit power, simple circuitry and
modulation [5], [6]. However, the radar faced major
shortcoming of range and speed ambiguities mainly due to
Doppler shift operation [7].
This paper proposed a low-cost FMCW radar design and
digital signal processing algorithm to detect moving targets.
The radar is designed to measure velocity and range over time
of the slow moving target simultaneously. Basically, FMCW
radar transmits continuous wave into space until hits target
and the backscattered signal from the dedicated object is
collected, and then mixed with some portions of the
transmitted signal. The mixed signal is known as beat signal
[7] which carries the target’s information.
The performance of the Continuous Wave (CW) radar on
detecting the target depends upon demanded value of Signal to
Noise Ratio (SNR) and resolution range [8] by the radar
system. Therefore, some considerations have been taken close
978-1-5090-2427-8/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICCCE.2016.90
attention to be able the radar system works properly and
subsequently accomplish the main goal. Further explanations
of the radar considerations are discussed in Section II while
Section III explains about radar system design and its
specifications. Section IV analyzes and describes the
exemplary measurement results in order to evaluate the
capability of the proposed radar design system and then finally
concluded in Section V.
II. RADAR CONSIDERATIONS
Selection of radar parameters is a very important process
to achieve the primary objective. High-level system design
and subsystem level requirements have been carefully
considered as below:
A. Operating Frequency
Normally, the frequency range of remote sensing
applications is in a range of 1GHz to 30 GHz. However, for
almost 100% penetration into space and earth, a frequency
range of 1GHz to 10 GHz must be selected [9].
In this paper, the radar system is designed to operate within
Industrial, Scientific and Medical(ISM) band with a center
frequency of 2.4GHz. The ISM band is an unlicensed band
and open for public usage, approved by Malaysian
Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC). It is
also within allowable frequency range by International
Telecommunication Union (ITU). Furthermore, the frequency
of transmit waveform is well suited for short range
applications that require low power consumption. The radar
power consumption is one of the important issue that need to
consider during radar design process in order to build a low
cost radar remote sensor. The lesser the radar power
consuming the lesser radar cost.
B. Modulation
CW radar has a limitation in measuring velocity due to less
timing mark in transmitted signal as discusses in [10].
However, the timing mark can be increased by applying
amplitude, phase or frequency modulation to the signal.
Therefore, frequency modulation has been implemented
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towards the radar signal to be able to measure both range and
velocity.
Moreover, FMCW is chosen because it has simple RF
architecture and also capable of providing wide transmit signal
bandwidth [11]. It is important to have wide chirp bandwidth,
BW as it can improve range resolution of the radar as shown
in (1). Range resolution, Δr is a capability of the radar to
differentiate several targets which are located closely at the
same time [12].
c a portion of the transmit signal at the mixer. After that, noise
Δr = (1)
2 BW
C. Data collector and signal processor
Laptop based system is used for data collection and signal
processing parts instead of using network analyzer based
system because laptop technology is capable of handling
various type of data source [9]. In addition, since future
project’s experiments need to be carried out outdoor, it is best
to choose a light and portable device for both parts.
III. PROPOSED RADAR DESIGN SYSTEM AND PARAMETERS
Generally, the proposed radar system consists of five parts;
transmitter, receiver, antenna, data collector and signal
processing as shown in Fig.1. Firstly, FMCW Radar Doppler
is built by assembling off-shelf electronic devices. Several
experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance
of the proposed radar design.
Fig.1: Proposed radar design system block diagram
At the transmitter, sweep duration signal of 40ms is
generated by a signal generator in order to produce a ramp
linear FM waveform for transmitting signal. The appropriate
values of the signal should be set carefully to transmit signal
frequency modulated at Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO).
Centre frequency of the radar system is fixed at 2.4GHz with a
supplied power of 12Volt DC. Fixed 3dB attenuator is placed
after VCO to control the amount of amplitude and power of
the transmit waveform. After that, the power amplifier of
14dB gain is used to amplify the signal and then it is separated
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into two ways; one towards transmitter antenna and another
one goes to mixer component. The radar implemented
11.26dBm transmit power and 52.3MHz transmit signal
bandwidth is set by the approximately 25Hz modulating
frequency.
The slow moving target backscattered signal is collected by
the directional antenna. Normally, receive signal power is very
small which is less than 10-18Watt[10]. The weak signal is
amplified by a 14dB gain of Low Noise Amplifier and then
proceed with mixing process between the received signal with
signals are filtered out by using the fourth order of Low Pass
Filter.
Waveform Audio (WAV) File is used to collect and store
the receive signal. The recorded signal is collected in analog
signal type. Therefore, MATLAB software is implemented as
a medium of digitalization. Inverse Fast Fourier Transform
(IFFT) and Doppler frequency shift methods are used to
measure the velocity of moving target as mathematically
shown in (2):
Δf .λ
Δv = (2)
2
Where Δf frequency difference of transmitting and receiving
frequency while λ is a wavelength of the radar system.
Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) and Range Time
Indicator (RTI) methods are used to measure the range of the
moving target. There are two different channels connected to a
laptop; a right channel (video signal) and a left channel
(synchronization pulse). Range data of the moving target can
be measured by searching for the rising edge of the left
channel [13].
Fig. 2 shows the assembled FMCW radar Doppler and its
parameters are summarized in Table-1:
Fig.2: An Assembled FMCW radar Doppler
 TABLE I: RADAR PARAMETERS

No. Parameter Value(unit)

1 Center frequency 2.4GHz

2 Transmit power 11.26dBm

3 Target range 20m

4 Min detectable signal -30dBm

5 Sweep period 40ms

6 Transmit bandwidth 53.2MHz

7 Waveform Linear FM

IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

A few experiments have been done to evaluate the
Fig.3: Walk, run and sprint velocity
performance of the proposed radar system in measuring range
and velocity of the moving target.
B. Experiment 2: People move with same speed

A. Experiment 1: People move with different speeds
Experiment 1 has been done by directing the radar
architecture towards a human who is moving forward and
away from the radar hardware. In this experiment, the person
moves with three different situations; walk, run and sprint.
Those situations are carried out at a same maximum distance,
which is 4meter in the same environment.
From the result in Fig.3, we could see that the energy
distribution for each situation is different; it is increased when
the speed of the moving target increases. The energy
distribution of 6s until 12s is lesser than energy at 19s to 25s
because the person moves faster than the previous situation
which is identical to the experimental or real situation.
From the result, the three different types of human body
movements can be differentiated as below:
• 6s to 12s : walk away from the radar hardware
• 12s to 18s: walk toward the radar hardware
• 19s to 22s: run away from the radar hardware
• 23s to 25s: sprint towards the radar hardware
In experiment 2, FMCW radar Doppler is deployed in front
of a pedestrian who moves at a same maximum distance and
speed. During the experiment, the person walks away from the
radar hardware and then return back, approaching the
hardware.
Fig.4 shows that signal intensity from 8s to15s is decreasing
while signal intensity from 24s to 31s is increasing where the
direction of the pedestrian can be classified. From the Fig.3,
we can conclude that person moves far away from the radar at
8s to 15s while approaches the radar at 24s to 31s.
The velocity of the person is measured by analyzing
Doppler-Time Intensity (DTI) which is set during signal
processing in MATLAB. For this experiment, the DTI is set at
-10 dB/m2.From the result, we could prove that the velocity of
the moving person is static the whole time which is
approximately 1 m/s.

Furthermore, this experiment also provides the measured

velocity of each situation. From the Fig.3, the measured
velocity of a walk, run and sprint are approximately 0.77m/s,
1.929m/s and 2.7m/s respectively. The pattern of measured
velocity increases as the person moves faster which matches
as the real situation.

Fig.4: Velocity measurement of moving target with same speed.

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 C. Experiment 3: Range measurement of moving target
Experiment 3 is tested to verify the capability of the
proposed radar design to measure and allocate the position of
the moving person. Fig.5 showed that the person moves far
away at 8s to 25s and approaches the radar from 25s to 40s.
The same situation is repeated from the 40s to 60s and 60s to
74s respectively. The result also showed that people moves at
maximum range of 17meters.
Based on the result also, it can be concluded that the
sensitivity of the radar performance to measure the range of
the moving people is low as it can detect the movement’s
locations at a short range; maximum range of 17meters. One
of the reasons is because the reflectivity from a human body is
very low and subsequently attenuates the transmit signal.
Fig.5: Ranging measurement
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed FMCW radar Doppler for
moving target detection and measurements; velocity and
range. The radar operates at a center frequency of 2.4GHz
with 11.3dBm transmit power. Doppler and IFFT digital
signal processing have been implemented to plot the
measurements. According to the result analysis, the radar can
detect and measure the minimum velocity of 0.77m/s and
maximum range of 17meters.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) and
Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) are highly
acknowledged as providing a fund for this project; registered
as RAGS 13-027-0090.
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