Aircraft classification based on radar cross section of long-range trajectories

The paper studies instantaneous Doppler signature extraction from within a very high frequency (VHF) band spectrogram presented by the authors in previous work. The context of the current method is long-range aircraft detection by VHF Doppler effect. The method proposed calculates bistatic radar (BR) cross-section (BRCS) profiles and the correlation between them for different types of aircraft. The analysis is based on data represented by automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) trajectory collection and passive BR with TV station as an illuminator of opportunity. Throughout the analysis, ADS-B data on location of an aircraft were adjusted with the use of extracted Doppler shift information. Then, this ground truth information on location was used for proper evaluation of BRCS profiles and, finally, for validation of the extraction method. The method is able to classify common intercontinental aircraft by size class with 70% accuracy from a 100-km distance by using an illuminator of opportunity located 300 km away.