An estimator for evaluating the parameters from the radar returned multicomponent micro-Doppler (m-D) signals is presented in this paper. While time frequency distribution (TFD) is commonly used to analyze the time-varying m-D frequency features in TF domain, the proposed algorithm is based on cubic phase function (CPF) that can transform the signal to time frequency rate domain. In order to
... [Show full abstract] estimate the parameters of multicomponent m-D signal, the extended Hough transform (HT) of CPF is employed to estimate linear frequency modulation (LFM) or sinusoidal frequency modulation (SFM) components. For the m-D signal composed of both LFM and SFM components, the estimates involve two steps of HT-CPF. Firstly, LFM components are estimated by HT-CPF and removed from the time frequency rate plane, and then, HT of the modified time frequency rate distribution is applied to estimate SFM ones. Compared with HT-TFD, this algorithm needs less dimension of HT space and is thus computationally efficient. In addition, simulations show that the algorithm has almost the same performance signal-to-noise threshold as HT of Wigner–Ville distribution method.