Efficient Estimation of the Helicopter Blade Parameter by Independent Component Analysis

We propose an efficient method to estimate various parameters of a helicopter blade including the number B
_num
and the length by separating the blade signal using independent component analysis (ICA) and an analytic solution obtained by monostatic/bistatic geometry. The proposed method is composed of two parts, one for even B
_num
and one for odd B
_num
. For even B
_num
the blade parameters are estimated using ICA plus analytic estimation. For odd B
_num
the parameters are estimated using two ICAs plus analytic estimation. Experimental results using the radar signal of a blade model calculated by physical optics demonstrate that the proposed method successfully separates the blade signals for both even and odd B
_num
s and estimates parameters with high accuracy.