Human target characteristic parameter extraction is an important approach of behavior monitoring. The extraction of the characteristic can be applied in various backgrounds, such as sanatorium and hospital. Therefore, this technology is widely studied. Towards extracting physiological characteristic parameters and motion characteristic features of human target, a novel human parameter extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper which has high detection accuracy. The high accuracy detection is achieved by combining the time-frequency analysis and image processing algorithm. Besides that, the utilization of short wavelength and evident micro-motion features inherent with terahertz radar also contributes the improvement of detection accuracy. Simulations test the effectiveness of proposed the algorithm, and illustrate its performance of high extraction precision and insensitivity to noise. For comparison, the simulations are also performed in X-band radar. Via the thorough simulations, we can clearly find the advantage of our proposed algorithm in human target characteristic parameter extraction. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.