An Investigation of Target Simulation Techniques for Microwave Perimeter Detection Systems

Microwave systems have been used around perimeters of high security installations for many years. The 30 cm metal sphere has been used as the universal standard to simulate the slow crawling target. With the advent of many new microwave perimeter systems, the security community has questioned the validity of this technique to accurately simulate a real intruder in all cases. This paper describes a preliminary study in which both bistatic and monostatic microwave sensors were used to test the 30 cm metal sphere against a human target. Signatures of each intrusion were recorded for later analysis in the laboratory. The data was processed and the target profiles were compared against the sphere.