A novel algorithm for radar classification based on doppler characteristics exploiting orthogonal Pseudo-Zernike polynomials

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems Vol. 51; no. 1; pp. 417 - 430
• Main Authors: Clemente, Carmine, Pallotta, Luca, De Maio, Antonio, Soraghan, John, Farina, Alfonso
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Blades; Classification; Doppler radar; Feature extraction; Polynomials; Spectrogram; Vectors
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2014.130762

Phase modulation induced by target micromotions introduces sidebands in the radar spectral signature returns. Time-frequency distributions facilitate the representation of such modulations in a micro-Doppler signature that is useful in the characterization and classification of targets. Reliable micro-Doppler signature classification requires the use of robust features that are capable of uniquely describing the micromotion. Moreover, future applications of micro-Doppler classification will require meaningful representation of the observed target by using a limited set of values. In this paper, the application of the pseudo-Zernike moments for micro-Doppler classification is introduced. Specifically, the proposed algorithm consists of the extraction of the pseudo-Zernike moments from the cadence velocity diagram (CVD). The use of pseudo-Zernike moments allows invariant features to be obtained that are able to discriminate the content of two-dimensional matrices with a small number of coefficients. The analysis has been conducted both on simulated and on real radar data, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for classification purposes.