Micro-Doppler Parameter Estimation Using Variational Mode Decomposition With Finite Rate of Innovation

Abstract

The complete characterization of a target by radar involves estimation of its range and Doppler and micro-Doppler frequencies. Finite Rate of Innovation (FRI) approaches allow for sampling at sub-Nyquist rates. Empirical Mode Decomposition, which recursively decomposes a signal into different modes of unknown spectral bands, has performance limitations such as sensitivity to noise and sampling rates. These limitations are partially addressed by several variant algorithms; one of them is Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), an entirely non-recursive model to extract the modes concurrently. In this paper, we propose an approach using FRI-based technique to estimate the delay of the target, and a VMD-based approach for Doppler and micro-Doppler parameter estimation. A novel mathematical analysis is proposed to identify the initialization parameters for faster convergence of the VMD algorithm. Further, we provide simulation results to show that the proposed approach is capable of estimating the parameters of multiple targets even in the presence of noise.