ISAR Imaging for Avian Species Identification With Frequency-Stepped Chirp Signals

Imaging an avian target by inverse synthesis aperture radar (ISAR) is a novel and important technological approach of solving the problem of avian detection. However, the ISAR images of birds obtained with the conventional range-Doppler algorithm could be contaminated due to serious micro-Doppler effects, which are generated by the birds´ flapping wings. In this letter, a novel imaging method of birds is proposed, which is simple to comprehend and operate, and avoids lots of complications and computation burdens. In the method, the moving status of bird is identified first via finding the variety of moving average values of the cross-correlation coefficient of the adjacent high-resolution range profiles. The usage of moving average values is attributed to the characters of the bird´s flapping. The parts of respective flapping spectrogram can then be eliminated, and the parts of the residual spectrogram, i.e., the respective gliding spectrogram, can be connected to prepare for the cross-compression. In this letter, the minimum waveform entropy criterion and genetic algorithm are employed in the spectrogram connection to compensate the phase error. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the methods are verified by simulation results.