Detecting abrupt change of an RCS sequence using duplicate CAMDF

Abstract

A target, such as an aircraft or a ballistic missile, may abruptly change its attitude under radar tracking, and it is very important to detect such changes for radar target recognition. Radar cross section (RCS) describes the scattering characteristics of the radar target, and it is an efficient feature for target recognition. RCS is sensitive to the target's attitudes, thus abrupt change of a target's attitude may cause abrupt change of its RCS sequence. In this paper, the problem of detecting abrupt change of an RCS sequence is studied. The duplicate circular average magnitude difference function (CAMDF) is exploited for detecting abrupt change of an RCS sequence, where we first compute duplicate CAMDF of the RCS sequence, and then fit duplicate CAMDF using a binomial function. This RCS sequence will have abrupt change if the root mean square (RMS) of the fitting errors is smaller than the threshold. In the experimental section, the effectiveness of our method on both simulation data and real data is verified.