Moving Vehicle Wheel Parameter Extraction via Micro-Doppler Feature Based on Matching Pursuit

Vehicle recognition using radar echo is critical in many applications. However, the discrimination of different kinds of vehicles is still a difficult problem because of their similar structures. For moving vehicles, besides the conventional features, the micro-Doppler (m-D) features induced by the rotation of vehicle's wheels are also useful in vehicle recognition. Most of current researches related to the m-D effect still analyze only a few scattering points and they are unable to extract the m-D features from the radar echo of the whole scene. Given this problem, in this paper, a moving vehicle wheel parameter extraction method via micro-Doppler feature based on matching pursuit is proposed, which can suppress the irrelevant signal components and extract the m-D features of wheels from the echo signal of the area illuminated by radar. Then the positions and the radiuses of wheels can be extracted for different kinds of vehicles discrimination. The simulations are given to validate the effectiveness of the algorithm and the results show the potential of the proposed method in moving vehicles recognition.