Simulation and analysis of micro-doppler signatures of tracked vehicles

It is important to discriminate or classify tracked vehicles such as tanks or armed cars. Radar micro-Doppler signatures (MDS), which show how different parts of the target move, have special advantages in discrimination or classification. Since it is not so easy to perform an experiment with a stationary radar observing a moving tracked vehicle, a method is presented in this paper to simulate received signal of moving tracked vehicles and analysis the MDS. First, build a static geometry model of a tracked vehicle in threedimensional (3D) mechanical CAD (computer-aided design) software, and establish its kinematic model in MATLAB. Divide the large surface of the static model into many small triangular flat plates, which are called facets, and export the mesh file into MATLAB. Calculate the coordinates of all the facets according to the kinematic model during the integration time of the radar and compute the time-varying radar cross section (RCS) of each facet using the Physical Optics approximation method. The received signal is calculated by summing the complex returned signals from all visible facets and the MDS are analysed with signal processing algorithm in order to get detailed information of fine structure of the moving vehicle.