Aircraft Target Classification Method for Conventional Narrowband Radar Based on Micro-Doppler Effect

Abstract

For a conventional narrowband radar system, its insufficient bandwidth usually leads to the lack of detectable information of the target, and it is difficult for the radar to classify the target types, such as rotor helicopter, propeller aircraft, and jet aircraft. To address the classification problem of three different types of aircraft target, a joint multifeature classification method based on the micro-Doppler effect in the echo caused by the target micromotion is proposed in this paper. Through the characteristics analysis of the target simulation echoes obtained from the target scattering point model, four features with obvious distinguishability are extracted from the time domain and frequency domain, respectively, that is, flicker interval, fractal dimension, modulation bandwidth, and second central moment. Then, a support vector machine model will be applied to the classification of the three different types of aircraft. Compared with the conventional method, the proposed method has better classification performance and can significantly improve the classification probability of aircraft target. The simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.