Feature Extraction Method of Helicopter Target Based on Flicker Phenomenon Combined With Phase Compensation

Abstract

For the typical multi-component periodic micro-Doppler signal parameter estimation, a helicopter rotor feature extraction method based on flicker phenomenon and phase compensation is proposed in this paper. The method firstly analyzes the formation mechanism of helicopter rotor flicker phenomenon in time domain and time-frequency domain through the integral model. Then the demodulation operator of the micro-Doppler signal is constructed for the phase compensation of the echoes with respect to the time-frequency flicker characteristics and the phase information of the slow time dimension of the target echoes. The parameter combination of the possible number of blades and rotational speed is predicted using the time domain flicker interval, and the phase compensation process is evaluated and optimized to significantly reduce the amount of computation. Finally, the parameter estimation of rotor blade number, blade length and rotational speed is acquired by calculating whether the center frequency of each flicker after phase compensation is periodically focused to zero frequency. The simulation results show that the method can effectively estimate the main parameters of helicopter rotor blades, and the processing results of the measured data show that the proposed method has more stable performance compared with OMP algorithm and Hough transform, which provides a new technical way for helicopter rotor blade feature extraction.

Keywords

• Helicopter target
• micro-Doppler effect
• flicker phenomenon
• phase compensation