Classification of birds and drones by exploiting periodical motions in Doppler spectrum series

Abstract

With the rapidly growing abuse of drones, monitoring and classification of birds and drones have become a crucial safety issue. With similar low radar cross sections (RCSs), velocities, and heights, drones are usually difficult to be distinguished from birds in radar measurements. In this paper, we propose to exploit different periodical motions of birds and drones from high-resolution Doppler spectrum sequences (DSSs) for classification. This paper presents an elaborate feature vector representing the periodic fluctuations of RCS and micro kinematics. Fed by the Doppler spectrum and feature sequence, the long to short-time memory (LSTM) is used to solve the time series classification. Different classification schemes to exploit the Doppler spectrum series are validated and compared by extensive real-data experiments, which confirms the effectiveness and superiorities of the proposed algorithm.