Sparse Recovery on Intrinsic Mode Functions for the Micro-Doppler Parameters Estimation of Small UAVs

Micro-Doppler (m-D) effect, induced by the rotation of rotor blades, provides an important signature to discriminate between small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aircrafts or birds in remote surveillance. Compared with the Doppler signal induced by the translation, m-D signal, however, is rather weak and consists of multiple frequency components. In this paper, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm is applied to addressing the mode-mixing problem in the returned signal. Theoretically, Doppler features are consequently allocated in the first few intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Rather, the partial components of the subsequent IMFs hold a similar property with the rotation signal. Those components are selected as the input data for the sparse recovery. With the sinusoidal frequency-modulated basis (SFMB), the essence of the recovery problem is converted into 1-D parameter optimization. Then, phase orthogonal matching pursuit (POMP) method is developed for the sparse solution. The proposed method is contrasted with the prevailing approach to solving the mode-mixing problem. Simulation results confirm the theoretical analysis, showing the feasibility in the estimation of m-D frequency. The preliminary findings from the measured data suggest that the proposed method has a potential application in the identification of small UAVs.