Clutter Suppression and Rotor Blade Feature Extraction of a Helicopter Based on Time–Frequency Flash Shifts in a Passive Bistatic Radar

• Published in: Atmosphere Vol. 13; no. 8; p. 1214
• Main Authors: Zhou, Zibo, Wang, Zhihui, Wang, Binbin, Xia, Saiqiang, Liu, Jianwei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2022
• Subjects: Airframes; Algorithms; Artificial satellites in navigation; Clutter; Code Division Multiple Access; Echoes; Feature extraction; flash shift; Frequency distribution; Fuselages; Geometry; Global navigation satellite system; Global positioning systems; GPS; Helicopters; Hovering; Iterative methods; Mathematical models; Methods; Multistatic radar; Navigation; Navigation satellites; Navigation systems; Navigational satellites; Optics; Parameter estimation; passive bistatic radar; phase compensation; Physical optics; Radar; Radar systems; Rotary wings; Satellites; Surveillance; Time-frequency analysis; time-frequency distribution; Transmitters; Unmanned aerial vehicles; China
• ISSN: 2073-4433; 2073-4433
• DOI: 10.3390/atmos13081214

This paper presents a passive bistatic radar (PBR) configuration using a global navigation satellite system as an illuminator of opportunity for the rotor blade feature extraction of a helicopter. Aiming at the strong fixed clutter in the surveillance channel of the PBR, a novel iteration clutter elimination method-based singular-value decomposition approach is proposed. Instead of the range elimination method used in the classic extended cancellation algorithm, the proposed clutter elimination method distinguishes the clutter using the largest singular value and by remove this value. At the same time, the fuselage echo of the hovering helicopter can also be suppressed along with the ground clutter, then the rotor echo of this can be obtained. In the micro-motion feature extraction, the mathematic principle of the flash generation process in the time–frequency distribution (TFD) is derived first. Next, the phase compensation method is applied to achieve the time–frequency flash shift in the TFD. After this, the center frequencies of the standard flashes in the TFD are compared with the standard frequency dictionary. The mean l1 norm is utilized to estimate the feature parameters of the helicopter rotor. In the experiments, the scattering point model and the physical optics facet model demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain more accurate parameter estimation results than some classic algorithms.