Low-SNR Recognition of UAV-to-Ground Targets Based on Micro-Doppler Signatures Using Deep Convolutional Denoising Encoders and Deep Residual Learning

The rapid development of flight control technology has made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) widely used in high-precision strikes on the battlefield. The premise of this is to achieve accurate target recognition using UAV-based radars. Aiming at three typical ground targets, including pedestrians, wheeled vehicles, and tracked vehicles, the micro-Doppler modulation caused by the random vibration of the UAV is analyzed in this article for the first time. To improve the recognition accuracy under low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), Doppler signals are transformed into time–frequency images, and a deep convolutional denoising encoder (DCDE) is designed to effectively remove the noise without suppressing micro-Doppler characteristics. To avoid the complicated micro-Doppler feature extraction, deep residual learning that can reduce the burden of network training and gain higher learning efficiency compared with traditional deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) is adopted. Recognition results under various occasions using denoised micro-Doppler images and designed residual learning network indicate that the proposed method has higher precision and better robustness than current methods. Even when the SNR is only −16 dB, the overall recognition accuracy still exceeds 90%.