Denoising FMCW Ladar Signals via EEMD With Singular Spectrum Constraint

Abstract

Frequency-modulation continuous-wave (FMCW) Laser radar (Ladar) signals may be polluted by noise, which reduces the recognition precision of the targets. This letter proposes an ensemble empirical modal decomposition (EEMD) denoising method with singular spectrum constraint for FMCW Ladar signals. In our approach, we apply EEMD to adaptively decompose the noisy FMCW Ladar signals into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and decompose these IMFs into several singular value components by using the singular spectrum analysis. The singular values are then used to calculate the energy probability of each IMF, which serves as an indicator to detect the IMFs containing useful signals. The energy probability represents the coherence of the IMFs such that we could sort these IMFs into noisy and useful components according to their coherence differences. To suppress the residual noise that is interfered with the selected IMFs, we use a low-rank approximation to reconstruct the useful signals. Finally, the reconstructed IMFs are stacked together to obtain the denoised signals. Tests on synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed method, compared to the EEMD denoising method, could suppress more noise but filter out less useful signals in the FMCW Ladar signal denoising.