IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO.

7, APRIL 1, 2016

2017

Human Movements Separation Based

on Principle Component Analysis
Xiaoran Shi, Feng Zhou, Member, IEEE, Mingliang Tao, and Zijing Zhang, Member, IEEE

Abstract With more and more attention to terrorist attacks,

rescue after disaster and medical treatments, the study on human
motions has become a hot topic in recent years. Thanks to the
unique mechanism of humans, the m-D signatures, which contain
extensive information, of each segment are obviously distinct.
It remains a great challenge to separate the movement of humans
each part. In this paper, a method for human movements separation based on a principle component analysis (PCA) is proposed.
As one of the classical methods in the blind source separation
problems, PCA decomposes the signal to a series of orthogonal
basis functions to construct the Eigen subspace. The original
signal can be represented by the linear combination of the
orthogonal basis functions. In addition, the Akaike information
criterion is utilized to determine the minimal number of output
for PCA. Furthermore, the ixegram and the optimization theory
are combined to cluster the principle components to three new
groups. Each group depicts one motion form of human. Simulated
results verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.
Index Terms Micro-Doppler (m-D) effect, human movement
separation, Akaike information criterion (AIC), principle
component analysis (PCA), clustering.

I. I NTRODUCTION

HANKS to its all-day and all-weather capabilities, radar

has found wide applications in both civil and military
fields [1][3]. With more and more attention to terrorist
attacks, rescue after disaster and medical treatments, the
study on human motions has become a hot topic in recent
years [4][10]. When a radar transmits electromagnetic (EM)
wave towards a moving human, the received echo signal will
be modulated by the human bodys rich movements. The
bulk motion results in Doppler Effect, and the micro-motions,
such as swing arms and legs, etc., bring the microDoppler (m-D) effect. Different human motion forms bring
different modulations, which result in different received signal
signatures. Due to the richness of the human motion mechanism, the m-D effect exists with the Doppler modulation.

Manuscript received June 4, 2015; revised November 2, 2015; accepted

December 10, 2015. Date of publication December 17, 2015; date of current
version February 10, 2016. This work was supported in part by the Program
for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant NCET-12-0916,
in part by the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral
Dissertation of China under Grant 201448, in part by the Young Scientist
Award of Shaanxi Province under Grant 2015KJXX-19, in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 7214534206,
Grant K5051202001, Grant K5051302047, and Grant NSIY031403, and
in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant 61201283, Grant 61471284, Grant 61522114, and Grant U1430123.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it
for publication was Prof. Julian C. C. Chan.
The authors are with the National Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing,
Xidian University, Xian 710071, China (e-mail: shixr_xidian@163.com;
fzhou@mail.xidian.edu.cn; mltao@foxmail.com; zjzhang@xidian.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2015.2509185

The application of research on the movement of pedestrians

includes identifying their motivation and preventing terrorist
attacks in advance, detecting whether there are the survivals in
the disaster area. In addition, the study on heart beating can be
applied to obtain the human vital signs in medical treatment.
In this paper, the detection of human body movements is the
emphasis. For radar, it cannot retrieve useful information from
the biological motion like human visual systems directly.
However, m-D signatures of human contain much information,
including whether armed, their activities, moving velocity,
step frequency, step length, etc. Some essential features can
be extracted from radar signals, and then the recognition
system can make sure the intention of the humans activities
so that some defensive measures can be taken in advance.
The research on m-D signature has been successfully applied in many areas in radar signal processing.
References [7][11] took different modeling approaches to
depict human activities and various classifiers were utilized
to discriminate different human gaits. Wheeled and tracked
vehicles were modeled and features were extracted to classify
based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) of m-D signatures [12]. The m-D effect of rotating blades based on low
resolution radar imaging was presented in [13]. A research on
m-D feature extraction method for airplane was investigated
in [14] by combining the EMD and CLEAN technique. The
analysis of human m-D signatures is a challenging problem.
For synthetic aperture radar (SAR) or inverse SAR (ISAR)
imaging, the existence of m-D leads to the degradation of
image quality [15], [16]. However, some latent information
such as motion parameters of objects could be extracted from
the m-D signatures, which might improve the performance
of radar recognition system. Therefore, it is of paramount
importance to study the m-D separation techniques. Some
basis functions, such as sinusoidal frequency-modulated basis
function [17] and chirplet basis function [18] were utilized
to parameterize the m-D signature. Due to the non-stationary
characteristic, several algorithms based on TF analysis were
studied removing the m-D signatures to improve the ISAR
image quality [19][24]. In addition, some statistic-based
methods, such as singular spectrum analysis [25], [26],
independent component analysis method [27] etc., were
proposed to decompose the data including the m-D signature
to extract and remove the m-D features of the targets, and
the returned signals of the main body could be reconstructed.
However, the aforementioned methods cannot separate
the m-D signatures of humans, which embeds abundant
micro-motions. Further, a feature-based approach to estimate

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 2016

the human motion parameters from radar spectrograms was

proposed in [28]. This approach was based on the walking
model of Boulic [29], and it was not suitable for other
human walking models. The separation technology was not
mentioned, only some parameters were estimated, and it could
not discriminate the element it belongs to. A modified highorder ambiguity function and CLEAN algorithm were jointly
utilized to depict the human m-D trajectories in [30]. But it
had high computation burden and there was no quantitative
guideline for determining the order of the polynomial-phase,
which was determined empirically.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II introduces the modeling of a moving human and
analyzes the m-D signatures of humans in detail. Section III
presents the proposed theory and methodology. The basic
principle of the PCA is discussed to extract the principle components (PCs). Here, the Akaike information criterion (AIC)
method in information theory is introduced to determine the
number of the output sources in PCA. In addition, the clustering technique based on ixegram is utilized to combine some
PCs with similar signatures to one component. Algorithm
description and diagram are shown in this section. Section IV
presents some simulations to verify the effectiveness of the
proposed algorithm. Section V gives the conclusion.
II. M ICRO -D OPPLER S IGNATURES OF H UMANS
As we all know, radar transmits EM signal to an object and
receives a returned signal from the object. The echoes reflect
the objects EM scattering characteristics, which are closely
related to their shapes and materials, etc. These properties are
of great importance for radar target recognition.
A. The Moving Model of Humans and the Analysis of
Doppler Signature
When there exist relative movements between objects and
radar, Doppler effects will occur. The Doppler frequency shift
is determined by the radial velocity of the moving object.
If the object or any structural component of the object has
a micro-motion, such as oscillatory, spinning, etc., in addition
to the bulk motion of the object, the micro-motion will induce
additional frequency modulation on the returned signal. Side
bands will appear around the Doppler shifted frequency which
is generated by the bulk motion. The additional Doppler
modulation is called the m-D effect.
As non-rigid body moving targets, humans have intricate
moving mechanism. Every segment possesses unique and
ordered movements. When humans are moving, their arms
and legs are swing periodically with torsos. Their moving
mechanism and Doppler signatures can be summarized as
follows:
i) The bulk motion of the human torso, which brings
Doppler frequency shifts;
ii) The micro-motion of swinging arms and legs, which
generates m-D frequency side bands.
With the unique model and movement mechanism, the
human body can be described through the 16 segments
in Fig. 1. The segments 1-6, which represent the head and

Fig. 1.

The movement model of a human.

the torso, shoulders and hips respectively, are considered

as sinusoidal vibration with small range based on a constant translating velocity; the segments 7, 8 and 12, 13
represent left and right swinging arms respectively; the segments 9, 10 and 14, 15 stand for the left and right pendulant
legs respectively; the segments 11, 16 are the two feet moving
with the legs. Ordinarily, the distance between the radar and
target is far enough to let the far field approximation hold.
The composite echo from a human can be expressed as the
summation of echoes from all the 16 segments. When the radar
transmits a signal with a single frequency, the baseband echo
from the human can be expressed as


16
16


4
(1)
Ri (t)
si (t) =
i exp j
s (t) =

i=1

i=1

where si (t) is the echo of i th segment of the human body at

time t, i is the radar cross section (RCS) of the i th segment,
is the wavelength of the transmitting signal, Ri (t) is
the instantaneous slant range of the i th segment at time t.
We assume that there is no echo before the human suddenly
starts walking and after sudden stopping. To facilitate the
analysis, let a human move along the negative direction
of y axis at a constant velocity v = [0, v, 0]T and the
superscript T denotes the transpose operator, the initial
position vector of the human is R0 , the azimuth angle and
pitch angle of the humans center of mass are and at
time t = 0 respectively, as shown in Fig. 1. Then the unit
vector of the radar line of sight (LOS) can be written as
[cos cos , cos sin , sin ]T . Simplify the movement of the
human as translating at a constant velocity of v, all segments
vibrate at a frequency upon the translation. However,
different segments have different vibrating amplitudes and
initial phases, i.e. amplitudes of segments 1-6 are usually less
than other segments, the feet always has the largest amplitude,
there are phase difference of between segments 7-11 and
segments 12-16. Therefore, the instantaneous slant range
from each part can be closely calculated by (2).
Ri (t) = R0 + vt + Ai sin (t + i ) , i = 1, 2, , 16
(2)
where  is the Euclidean norm, =
is the vector
form of the vibrating frequency of limbs, Ai is the vibrating
amplitude of i th segment, i is the initial angle of the
[0, , 0]T

SHI et al.: HUMAN MOVEMENTS SEPARATION BASED ON PCA

2019

i th segment between human torso and limbs at the initial

time. The instantaneous Doppler frequency can be derived as
follows.
T
2
v + T Ai cos (t + 0 ) ,
f D (t) =

i = 1, 2, , 16 (3)
where is the unit vector of the radar LOS. In (3), the first
part is the Doppler frequency component; the second part
is the m-D frequency component. The periodic property is
easily seen in (3). The description above is only an ideal
situation. In the practical application, the bulk motion of the
human is not always even. In each moving cycle, acceleration
and deceleration are coupled.
B. Time-Frequency Analysis for Human Echo
According to the forenamed analysis, the non-stationary
properties for human echo are noticeable. While the Fourier
transform (FT) is a very useful concept for stationary signals,
many signals encouraged in real-world situations have
frequency contents that change over time. Joint TF transforms
were developed for the purpose of characterizing the timevarying frequency contents of a signal. The best-known TF
representation of a time signal dates back to Gabor and
is known as the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) [31].
It is basically a moving window FT. By examining the
frequency content of the signal as the time window moves,
a 2-dimensional (2-D) TF distribution called the spectrogram
is generated. The discretized STFT is defined as,
S (m, n) =

s (k) (kT mT ) exp [ j 2 (n F) k]

(4)

k=

where s (k) is the discrete signal, T and F are sample

period of time and frequency respectively, m and n are the
time and frequency sample number, (k) is the window
function. There are many other TF methods, i.e., WignerVille distribution (WVD), reassigned smoothed pseudo WVD,
S-method [32], [33], etc., which possess well TF performance
and will be considered in the future work. STFT has its
superiority of no cross terms, which is very significant for
the complexity of human movements. In addition, the lower
computation just meets the real-time demand for engineering
applications. The drawback of the STFT is the resolution
limit imposed by the Heisenberg inequality [34]. A shorter
time window results in better time resolution, but leads to
worse frequency resolution, and vice versa. As long as we
choose the eligible window function, the resolution demand
is easy to meet for characterizing the signal. Hence, it is
enough for the STFT method to represent the non-stationary
property of the human echo.
III. T HEORY AND M ETHODOLOGY
In this section, the details of the proposed algorithm for
human movement separation based on PCA are described.
A single pulse signal is projected onto a manifold by sliding
window operation, and AIC is employed to select the minimal
number of the signal outputs. Then, PCA is applied to extract

the prominent bases, which can be used to represent the main

energy of human echo. At last, the ixegram is adopted to measure the mutual similarities of components in a human echo.
Through converting to a nonlinear constrained optimization
problem for clustering the PCs, well echo separation result
of different human segments from the whole echo can be
obtained.
A single pulse echo is a L 1 signal. To satisfy the
requirement of PCA, a moving window is utilized to obtain
the N K input signal
X = [x1 , x2 , , x N ]T

(5)

where N is the number of observations,

K is the time sample

number, xi = x i1 , x i2 , , x i,K is the i th observation signal.
High-correlation properties exist among these N observations.
Therefore, there are much redundancy between these components. Akaikes information criterion (AIC), one of frequently
used methods for model selection, is utilized to remove the
multiplicity among the components before PCA.

A. Model Selection Based on AIC

AIC is an approach to detecting the number of signals
in a multi-channel time-series based on the application
of the information theoretic criteria for model selection.
A priori knowledge or any subjective threshold settings are
not needed. It is frequently used in the application of model
selection. Minimize the AIC criterion to obtain the number
of signals [35]. AIC estimator has two hypothesizes:
i) The dimension of the signal subspace must be less than
or equal to the number of observations;
ii) The number of time samples in the snapshot must be
greater than the number of the observations.
For X, as shown in (5), there are N observations, and each
observation has K time samples, where N  K . Finding
the number of sources is equivalent to finding the multiplicity
of the smallest eigenvalues of the sampled spatial covariance
matrix. The sampled spatial covariance matrix constructed
from a data snapshot is utilized in place of the actual covariance matrix. The estimator is based on a cost function. And
the solution for the dimension, d is given as follows.
dAIC = arg min [L d + d (2N d)]

(6)

where

L d (d) = K (N d) ln

1
N d

N

i=d+1

N


1
 Nd

i=d+1

Sort the eigenvalues of the spatial covariance matrix in the

descending order, i is the i th eigenvalue. Traverse d from
1 to N. The value of d at that point when (6) reaches its
minimum is of great use for PCA. The condition d N must
be hold. So far, two hypothesizes are both met. The principle
of PCA will be described in the following subsection.

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 2016

Fig. 2.

The diagram of the proposed method.

B. Theory of PCA
PCA is a classical analytical method of statistics. It is
a de-correlation technique which has been widely used for
dimensionality reduction in the applications of pattern recognition, data compression and noise rejection [36]. Besides
de-correlation, the PCA is a tool in statistical data analysis
and uses eigenvectors corresponding to the largest eigenvalues
to obtain a set of function bases so that the original signal can
be represented by a linear combination of these bases. Under
the condition of Gauss distribution, PCA can maximize the
information of output signals. Therefore, PCA, as a simple and
convenient method, help us solve problems and save the most
information: i) simplify the data by dimensionality reduction;
ii) save the original signal information as much as possible.
A moving window is applied for a single pulse echo, then
an input signal of N components is obtained, as expressed
in (5). First, estimate the mean value of xi , denoted as i ,
and thus, the mean value vector of X can be written as
= E [X] = [1 , 2 , , n ]T

(7)

Second, subtract from X to centralize the matrix X, then

is achieved.
the centralized matrix X
= [x1 1 , x2 2 , , xn n ]T
X

(8)

Then, take
Third, calculate the co-variance matrix S of X.
the singular value decomposition (SVD) for the co-variance
matrix S. It can be expressed as
S = U V

(9)

where U is an N N matrix, is an N K diagonal matrix,

which is composed of eigenvalues of S, V is a K K matrix.

Fig. 3. The simulation result of human movement model. (a) Range profile;
and (b) TF spectrogram.

Meanwhile, the eigenvalues in are sorted in a descending

order. According to the dimension d determined by AIC,
extract the first d eigenvalues, the first d columns of U can be
spanned into an Eigen-subspace U1 = [u1 , u2 , , ud ]. Map
the Eigen-subspace to signal space.
1i d
Yi = ui uiH X,

(10)

where the superscript H denotes the conjugate transpose operator, Yi is a N K matrix. At last, take the inverse operation
of the first step for Yi to reconstruct the 1-D signal zi with
the same size of the original signal. The de-correlation matrix
can be obtained.
Z = [z1 , z2 , , zd ]T

(11)

where Z is a d L matrix, which can represent the prominent

energy of the original signal. Each row of Z is a PC and the
PCs are de-correlated with each other.
C. Principle Components Grouping
After PCA, the signal is decomposed into a series of
components. However, some of them might originated
from the same physical process. Therefore, some clustering
technologies must be performed to cluster them. We introduce
a method for calculating the similarities of components.
PCs of great similarities will be clustered into one group.
Here, the ixegram, also referred to as PC cross-entropy matrix,
is utilized to represent the similarities of different PCs [37].

SHI et al.: HUMAN MOVEMENTS SEPARATION BASED ON PCA

2021

Fig. 4.
The TF spectrograms of each segment of the moving human: (a) Head; (b) Torso; (c) Left shoulder; (d) Right shoulder; (e) Left U-arm;
(f) Right U-arm; (g) Left L-arm; (h) Right L-arm; (i) Left hip; (j) Right hip; (k) Left U-leg; (l) Right U-leg; (m) Left L-leg; (n) Right L-leg;
(o) Left foot; and (p) Right foot.

The approximation of the symmetric Kullback-Leibler (K-L)

divergence [38] is utilized to present the pairwise
similarity exhaustively over the set of PCs. The K-L
divergence can be calculated using two probability functions,
p (t) and q (t).
1
K L [ p (t) , q (t)] =
2



p (t)
dt
p (t) log
q (t)


q (t)
dt
+ q (t) log
p (t)

be refined:
min H (M; D) =
M

l=1

The ixegram, i.e., cross-entropy matrix, is defined as



D (i, j) = K L pu i (t) , qu j (t) , i, j {1, 2, , n} (13)
where u i and u j can be the same PC or two different PCs.
According to (13), the cross-entropy matrix has the following
fundamental properties:
i) D is a symmetric matrix,
i.e., D T = D holds;


0.
Furthermore,
ii) K L Pu i (t) , Pu j (t)


=
0, if and only if
K L Pu i (t) , Pu j (t)
Pu i (t) = Pu j (t).
So the leading diagonal elements of D are necessarily
all zero, others are positive. To obtain an optimal
partitioning of the ixegram into L classes, the
nonlinear constrained optimization problem as follows can

1
n

j =1

M jl

n 
n


Mil M pl Dip

i=1 p=i

s.t. 0 Mi, j 1, i = 1, 2, , n, j = 1, 2, , L
L


(12)

L


Mi j = 1, i = 1, 2, , n

(14)

j =1

where the cost function H (M; D) measures the compactness

within-cluster and the homogeneity between-cluster, D is the
forenamed ixegram matrix, M is an n L assignment matrix,

P ( u 1 | c1 ) P ( u 1 | c2 ) P ( u 1 | c L )
P ( u 2 | c1 ) P ( u 2 | c2 ) P ( u 2 | c L )

M =
(15)
..
..
..
..

.
.
.
.
P ( u n | c1 ) P ( u n | c2 ) P ( u n | c L )


where P u i | c j is the probability of assigning component
u i in class c j . The solution to (14) could derive the M, and
the class that each PC belongs to is determined by looking
up the maximal terms of each row.
D. Algorithm Description and Diagram
An algorithm for human movements separation based on
PCA is proposed in this paper. The diagram of this method is
concluded in Fig. 2. First, a procedure of moving window

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 2016

Fig. 5. The PDF of each segment of the human (a) Head; (b) Torso; (c) Left shoulder; (d) Right shoulder; (e) Left U-arm; (f) Right U-arm; (g) Left L-arm;
(h) Right L-arm; (i) Left hip; (j) Right hip; (k) Left U-leg; (l) Right U-leg; (m) Left L-leg; (n) Right L-leg; (o) Left foot; and (p) Right foot.

is performed here to transform the one pulse echo signal

into a 2-D multi-channel signal. Signals within channels
are highly correlated. Next, the PCA method is operated to
extract the PCs, the number of which is determined by AIC.
The main procedure of PCA method can be summarized as
follows: 1) AIC technique determines the number of PCs;
2) Subtract the mean value of the 2-D multi-channel signal to obtain the centralized matrix; 3) SVD is utilized
for the covariance matrix of the centralized matrix; 4) Sort
the eigenvalues and construct the Eigen-subspace, which is
composed by the eigenvectors corresponding to the larger d
eigenvalues; 5) Project the Eigen-subspace into the original
signal space; 6) Take the inverse operation of 1) to rearrange
the 2-D signal to the final 1-D signal. Then, through the
ixegram matrix measuring the similarities between PCs, the
conventional constrained optimization method is adopted to
combine the PCs. The recombined groups denote the same
signature, as three new dominant components representing the
signal of three dominant parts of human.
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
The theory and methodology of human movements separation based on PCA are discussed in the aforementioned sections. In what follows, we will demonstrate the effectiveness
of the proposed method by simulations.
A. Micro-Doppler Signature of Each Segment of Human
Radar transmits single-frequency signal, carrier frequency
is f = 15 GHz, range resolution is 0.01 m, pulse repetition frequency is 2000 Hz, the total pulse number is 6144.

TABLE I
S EGMENT L ENGTHS OF H UMAN M ODEL

The humans relative velocity is 2.0 m/s. And the segments

lengths of human model are shown in TABLE I.
Fig. 3 is the simulation result of human movement model.
Fig. 3 (a) is the range profile. We can conclude that the human
is approximately 10 meters far away from the radar at the initial time. Due to the high range resolution, the human occupies
different range cells at different time and he is moving close to
the radar. Through the echo summation in the range direction,
a 1-D time-sampled signal could be obtained and then the
spectrogram is acquired via the STFT, as shown in Fig. 3 (b).
From Fig. 3 (b), the non-stationary characteristic of human
echo is obviously seen. The TF signatures are respected by a
series of periodic sinusoidal curves. Different curves denote
different segments of the human. Meanwhile, they have the
same period but distinct amplitudes and intensities. We can
obtain the step frequency from the period, the amplitude shows
different variation range of velocity, and the intensities are
relative to the RCS of every segment. The torso has the
largest RCS, i.e. the strongest intensity but the narrowest

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2023

TABLE II
P ROBABILITY M ATRIX AND C LUSTERING R ESULT
FOR E ACH S EGMENT OF H UMAN

frequency band. The highest amplitude is corresponding to

the feet, because the feet, relative to torso, have the widest
variation range of velocity. However, the intensities are the
lowest because the area of the feet is the smallest among all
segments, corresponding to the smallest RCS.
Fig. 4 represents the TF spectrograms of each segment of
the pedestrian. Fig. 4 (a), (b), (c), (d), (i), (j) denote the
TF spectrograms of human head, torso, shoulders and hips
respectively, which have similar m-D signatures; Fig. 4 (e), (g),
(k), (m) and Fig. 4 (f), (h), (l), (n) represent TF spectrograms
of limbs, there exists phase shift of between the right and
the left. Fig. 4 (o) and (p) show the TF spectrograms of
the left and right feet with the most obvious characteristic.
It can be concluded that different segments have different m-D
signatures. Different signatures contain different information.
Fig. 3 (b) is the summation of the spectrograms in Fig. 4.
The different amplitudes and intensities are evidently seen
from Fig. 4. However, there are two kinds of cycles in all
these spectrograms. One is assumed as T , as the representative
of torso; another is 2T , the period of limbs and feet. For
single side of limbs, the cycle is swinging up and down; for
single foot, there exists two modes, moving for T and staying
on the ground for T . The real step cycle is corresponding
to 2T . This model is based on biomechanical experimental
data. The acceleration and deceleration for torso in a step
cycle are taken into consideration. Therefore, the properties
of sinusoidal variation with time for frequency are illustrated
clearly in Fig. 4 (a) - (d) and (i) - (j).
Fig. 5 shows the probability density function (PDF) of
each segment. It can be conclude that some segments share
the similar probability distributions, for example the shape
of the curves in Fig. 5 (m) - (p) are mostly the same.
However, the range of x-coordinate and the curves amplitude
are different. This is upon on the different RCS of segments.
Segments with similar probabilities need to cluster into one
group using (14). The probability matrix and clustering result

Fig. 6. The TF spectrograms of three new groups. (a) - (c) denote the
TF spectrograms of the 1st - 3rd group, respectively.

for each segment of the human are shown in TABLE II.

It agrees with the result of Fig. 5. S1 S16 denote head, torso,
left and right shoulders, left and right upper arms, left and right
lower arms, left and right hips, left and right upper legs, left
and right lower legs, left and right feet respectively. It can
be concluded that the signals with similar PDF are clustered
to one group. For example, the PDF of S1S4 and S9S10
are similar, and these six signals are clustered to G1. Similar
observations can be found with respect to other segments of
the human.
Take the STFT for the new groups, the TF spectrograms are
shown in Fig. 6. It is concluded that the clustering result is
satisfactory. G1 denotes the bulk motion of the moving human,

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 2016

Fig. 7.

The TF distributions of 19 PCs. (a) - (s) demote the TF spectrograms of the 1st - 19th PC, respectively.

G2 represents the limbs movements except the lower legs,

and G3 depicts the movements of lower legs and feet. It is
coincided with the theoretical analysis.
B. The Simulation of Human Separation Based on PCA
The proposed method is applied to the above simulation.
First, a 2-D signal of 32 channels is achieved using a sliding
window to the aforementioned 1-D time-sampled signal. Next,
determine the minimal number of signal channel through AIC,
the number is set to be 19. Then, using PCA projects the
signal into Eigen-subspace, extract the prominent subspaces
to express the original signal, and then map them onto the
original signal space again. Finally, 19 de-correlated PCs
are obtained. The TF spectrograms of 19 PCs are shown
in Fig. 7 (a) (s) respectively. From Fig. 7, we can conclude
that some PCs, which have the similar TF characteristic,
can be recombined together to become one new group.
Therefore, some clustering techniques must be introduced to
achieve this function.
Through computing the similarities between PCs, determine
which PCs can be clustered into one group. The calculation
of similarity is described in section III-C.

Fig. 8 is the cross-entropy matrix of the 19 PCs. It is a

symmetric matrix and the leading diagonal elements are all
zeros. It is coincided with the theoretical analysis. We cluster
these PCs into three new groups. The probability matrix, as
well as the clustering result is shown in TABLE III. It is shown
that most PCs are clustered into a certain group with definite
score, except for the 2nd, 3rd PCs.
The TF spectrograms of these three new groups are shown in
Fig. 9 (a) - (c). Compared with Fig. 3 (b), Fig. 9 (a) shows the
main energy, which represents the bulk motion of the moving
human. Compared with Fig. 6, Fig. 9 (a) exactly corresponds
to Fig. 6 (a). The motion of human body brings Doppler Effect
and represents the Doppler frequency. Its fluctuant characteristic depicts the acceleration and deceleration in a moving cycle
of a human. Its instantaneous Doppler frequency shift denotes
the instantaneous body velocity in radar LOS. Therefore, the
1st group can be characterized the bulk motion of the moving
human. Fig. 9 (b), which is just corresponding to the movements of human limbs and matches with Fig. 6 (b), has the
abundant m-D signatures. Its periodic characteristic shows the
frequency of swing arms and legs. We can obtain the step cycle
of human moving based on this period. The period of swing

SHI et al.: HUMAN MOVEMENTS SEPARATION BASED ON PCA

Fig. 8.

2025

The cross-entropy matrix of the PCs.

TABLE III
P ROBABILITY M ATRIX AND C LUSTERING R ESULT OF THE PCs

Fig. 9. The TF spectrograms of the new groups. (a) - (c) denote the TF
spectrograms of the 1st - 3rd new group respectively.

arms and body moving are closely related, basically twice.

Fig. 9 (c) shows the most obvious m-D signatures, which
can describe the lower legs and feet movements. Fig. 9 (c) is
corresponding to Fig. 6 (c). Due to the alternative appearance
of the largest movement amplitude for humans left and right
feet in a step cycle, there exists the bright strap in the
middle of Fig. 9 (c). In a moving cycle, there is always
one foot on the ground. At that time, its Doppler frequency
shift will be zero. This is the reason for the existence of
the bright strap. In all, compared with Fig. 6, the clustering
result of the PCs are coincided with the theoretical simulation
basically. Therefore, the effectiveness of the clustering method
is verified. Meanwhile, human movements separation based on
PCA is feasible. To a certain extent, movements of different
segments of human can be described by the PCs.

In contrast, the human movement separation based on

CEMD is carried on. The result is shown in Fig. 10. The
human echo is decomposed into 5 intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), the summation of which is already more than
90% of the total energy. According to section III-C, they are
clustered into 3 new groups. From Fig. 10 (a), the movements
of torso could not be distinguished clearly, it is contaminate by
other segments, all limbs and feet can be seen in Fig. 10 (a).
Fig. 10 (b) represents the TF spectrograms of limbs. Compared
with Fig. 4, not all the limbs are included. Although the
moving period can be obtained, other parameters, i.e. the
velocity range of limbs, cannot get exactly. Fig. 10 (c) denotes
the TF spectrogram of the feet. In a step cycle, there is
always one foot staying on the ground, its velocity is 0.

2026

IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 2016

movements. The number of PCs is determined adaptively

via AIC. PCA method is utilized to decompose the whole
human echo into a series of basis functions to reconstruct the
original signal. Due to the similarities between some PCs, the
clustering technology based on ixegram is adopted. Trough
maximizing the homogeneity between-PCs and minimizing
the compactness within-PCs, combine the PCs into three
new groups via solving an optimization problem. Each group
describes one movement of the moving human. In all, the
proposed algorithm is combined information theory, statistical
method, and optimization tool to separate human movements.
Simulation results demonstrate the theoretical analysis. Meanwhile the validity of the proposed algorithm is verified. In our
future work, we will try our best to obtain some measured data
or find some open database on the Internet in order to verify
the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in real situation.
Additionally, more separation methods will be studied.
R EFERENCES

Fig. 10. The TF spectrograms of separation based on CEMD. (a) - (c) denote
the TF spectrograms of the 1st - 3rd new group respectively.

Frequency components round 0 can be only seen Fig. 10 (c),

another moving foot is not depicted, and this part is added into
the torso segment. The basic principle of CEMD is decomposing signals according to the frequency value. However, the
velocity of each segment is not constant, and it is varying
with time. Every segment occupies a frequency band, there are
overlapping between them. Therefore, CEMD is not suitable
to separate human movements. Compared with Fig. 9, the
proposd algorithm in this paper has better result.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, an algorithm for human movements separation based on PCA is proposed to decompose the human

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Xiaoran Shi was born in Hebei, China, in 1987.

She received the B.S. degree in electronic information science and technology from Xidian University,
Xian, China, in 2011, where she is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in signal processing with
the National Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing.
Her major research is the microDoppler signature
analysis and target classification.

Feng Zhou (M11) was born in Henan, China,

in 1980. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees
in signal and information processing from Xidian
University, Xian, China, in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He is currently a Professor with the National
Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing, Xidian University. His research interests are radar imaging and
jamming suppression.
Prof. Zhou was granted the program for New
Century Excellent Talents in University in China and
was a recipient of the Young Scientist Award from
the XXXI URSI GASS committee.

Mingliang Tao was born in Hunan, China, in 1989.

He received the B.Eng. degree in intelligent science and technology from Xidian University, Xian,
China, in 2011, where he is currently pursuing the
Ph.D. degree in signal processing with the National
Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing. His major
research interests are interference mitigation, radar
imaging, and PolSAR.

Zijing Zhang (M11) was born in Beijing, China,

in 1967. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
in dynamics from the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 1989 and 1992, respectively,
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
Xidian University, Xian, China, in 2001. In 2006,
he was a Visiting Scholar with the University of
Manchester, Manchester, U.K. Since 1992, he has
been with the National Laboratory of Radar Signal
Processing, Xidian University, where he is currently
a Professor. His current research interests include
radar signal processing and multirate filter banks design.