Micro-Doppler imaging for fast rotating targets using illuminators of opportunity
In recent years the use of illuminators of opportunity for target detection and tracking has received renewed interest. Most aerial targets have some forms of fast rotating structures that cause micro-Doppler (m–D) effect and can be used to assist in the classification process. There is also a good potential to use m–D for imaging such rotating structure because they contain geometry characteristic information about the rotating structure. The imaging results are expected to provide richer information for classification purposes. Conventional inverse synthetic aperture radar requires small rotation angle as well as wideband waveform. Tomography provides an opportunity to image fast rotating targets for narrowband continuous wave radar using m–D information only. This study first introduces the foundations of m–D imaging. Then, the simulation results are presented. Finally, the field experiments are described, together with the illustration and analysis of typical experimental results. Both the simulations and experimental data validate the effectiveness of the method.
