An Improved MTI filter for Ground Clutter Reduction in UAV Classification

Abstract

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have increasingly been used in many civil applications. However, they also pose a significant threat in restricted zones. Radar can be used to detect and discriminate UAVs. Due to the low flying altitude of the UAVs, it is found that the radar signals also include some unwanted echoes, reflected by building, ground, trees and grasses etc. Consequently, it has not been possible to get the clean UAVs characteristics for further classification. In this paper, the MTI filter is applied to cancel the ground clutter and based this, an improved MTI filter is further proposed. Compared with the traditional MTI filter, the improved one significantly enhances ground clutter rejection capability while maintaining most of the target power. As the result, the cleaner UAVs classification characteristics can be obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified by an experimental CW radar dataset, collected from a helicopter UAV.