Target Turning Maneuver Detection using High Resolution Doppler Profile

Target turning maneuvering is always accompanied with the rapid attitude variations, which are helpful to achieve high cross-range resolution for pulsed coherent radar. Thus, it is feasible to detect target turning maneuver using the high resolution Doppler profile (HRDP). The preliminaries concerning the HRDP are first introduced, including its formulation, extraction requirements, and procedure. The principle of turning maneuver detection using the HRDP is then fully explored. A novel detector is developed based on the back propagation (BP) neural network. Two novel indices for performance evaluation are proposed. Finally, a simulation environment with software tools capable of generating target dynamic echoes with realistic features is developed. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed detector performs better than the other three up-to-date feature-based detectors as a whole.