Estimation of Drone Micro-Doppler Signatures via Track-Before-Detect in Array Radars
Kimin Kim, Murat Üney, B. Mulgrew · 2019
In this work, we consider the estimation of micro-Doppler signatures of small rotary-wing aircraft such as drones using a pulsed radar with a uniform planar array (UPA) receiver in order to identify/classify them within the processing performed for their detection. Such objects induce low signal to noise ratio (SNR) reflections which complicate their detection and Doppler processing. We propose a novel track-before-detect algorithm which simultaneously estimates complex reflection coefficients, micro-Doppler features in the form of additional frequency shifts generated by rotating blades and the motion trajectory before the decision on object existence is made. We demonstrate the efficacy of our estimation scheme in a simulation example and compare with conventional techniques.