Time-Frequency Analysis using V-band Radar for Drone Detection and Classification

Detection and classification of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), namely drones, is an active area of research. Radars are all-weather instrument that operate in various frequency bands and are used for monitoring drone activities. However, little experimental work has been done with radars that operate in the V-band (40 GHz to 75 GHz) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This paper presents drone detection data collected using a 66 GHz research radar from aiRadar Inc. Micro-Doppler signatures of the rotating drone rotors are extracted using short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and continuous wavelet transforms (CWT). It was determined that the complex Morlet wavelet provides more detailed micro-Doppler features that can be used for classifying different drones.