Ballistic missile detection via micro-Doppler frequency estimation from radar return

The spinning motion of a ballistic missile (BM), which is a kind of micro-Doppler motion, induces additional frequency modulation on the returned radar signal. This modulation period in frequency, called the micro-Doppler modulation frequency, is a stable and unique parameter in radar target recognition. This paper first establishes the radar signal model of the spinning missile during flight, and then extracts the micro-Doppler modulation frequency through analysis of the periodic structure of the resulting spectrogram (short-time Fourier transform (STFT)) – i.e., the time–frequency distribution (TFD). In order to be used for BM target recognition we implemented a data-dependent optimal window length for the STFT. We treated the resultant TFD as an image and then used the 2-D DFT/FFT for feature extraction. Experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed method.