Inoh Choi, Min Kim, Jaeho Choi, and Jeonggi Park of POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering (advisor: Professor Kyung-Tae Kim) received a Best Paper Award at the 2019 Summer Conference of the Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science, held Thursday, August 22–Saturday, August 24. Their paper was titled “Noncontact Vital Sign Detection of Two Humans at Same Distance Using Efficient Signal Decomposition.”

To detect vital signs without contact from two closely spaced targets, the team proposed an analytical solution for separating a one-dimensional time-domain radar received signal into received signals for the individual targets.

Because the signal separation problem is an underdetermined system with one input and two outputs, they reinterpreted it as a determined system using the I and Q channels. They then mathematically expanded the equations to derive an analytical solution and a simple, efficient signal separation method.

Finally, they demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed technique using actual measurement data from an IR-UWB radar, earning the Best Paper Award.