Micro-motion feature analysis and parameter estimation methods for moving ship

Micro-motion parameter estimation is an important way to improve ability of radar to detect the ship target. Focusing on the difficulty and speed problems existing in the current parameter estimation method of a complex moving ship, based on the analytical result of the echo's time-frequency features, a novel method to estimate the micro-motion period by calculating the backward shift cross-correlation coefficients of the echo's sparse time-frequency matrix is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the backward shift cross-correlation coefficients of the echo's sparse time-frequency matrix are calculated using the FFT (fast Fourier transform) algorithm. The peaks positions of the cross-correlation coefficients matrix are then detected. Finally, the period can be figured out quickly. Compared with the general method, the proposed method can estimate the micro-motion period accurately and quickly. A computer simulation is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.