Separation of micro-Doppler signals based on time frequency filter and Viterbi algorithm

Micro-Doppler (m-D) effect is potential useful in radar target detection, recognition, and classification. While the m-D signals are always multicomponent, it is important to separate the m-D signals for feature extraction. This paper introduces a separation algorithm based on time-frequency filter (TFF). When the m-D multicomponent signals are always overlapped in TF plane, Viterbi algorithm on time-frequency distribution is used to firstly estimate the instantaneous frequencies, then an automatic TFF is designed to filter and synthesize the interesting m-D signal. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively extract the m-D signals even in a relatively high noise environment.