Use of ICA to Separate Micro-Doppler Signatures in ISAR Images of Aircraft That Has Fast-Rotating Parts

Abstract

In this article, we propose a new signal-decomposition algorithm composed of three steps: principal components analysis to yield high-resolution range profiles with improved signal-to-noise ratio; estimation of whitening and mixing matrices using independent component analysis in distributed radar network; and signal decomposition to obtain inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images that correspond to rigid body and fast-rotating parts by using estimated two matrices regardless of complicated range migration. The proposed method efficiently removes image blur caused by micro-Doppler (MD) signals of rotating parts and reduces the sensitivity to noise. In simulations, our proposed method could perform accurate and robust removal of the MD signatures to obtain a focused ISAR image of an aircraft with fast-rotating parts.