Parameter estimation for micro-Doppler signals based on cubic phase function

An estimator for evaluating the parameters from the radar returned multicomponent micro-Doppler (m-D) signals is presented in this paper. While time frequency distribution (TFD) is commonly used to analyze the time-varying m-D frequency features in TF domain, the proposed algorithm is based on cubic phase function (CPF) that can transform the signal to time frequency rate domain. In order to estimate the parameters of multicomponent m-D signal, the extended Hough transform (HT) of CPF is employed to estimate linear frequency modulation (LFM) or sinusoidal frequency modulation (SFM) components. For the m-D signal composed of both LFM and SFM components, the estimates involve two steps of HT-CPF. Firstly, LFM components are estimated by HT-CPF and removed from the time frequency rate plane, and then, HT of the modified time frequency rate distribution is applied to estimate SFM ones. Compared with HT-TFD, this algorithm needs less dimension of HT space and is thus computationally efficient. In addition, simulations show that the algorithm has almost the same performance signal-to-noise threshold as HT of Wigner–Ville distribution method.