A robust detection method for micro-Doppler feature of rotating blades under low SNR

Rotation of rotor blades is typically micro-motion and would induce micro-Doppler modulation. However, accurate detection will become extremely difficult when the echo signal is corrupted by strong noise. This paper proposes a method to realize extraction of micro-Doppler feature from the rotating rotor blade echo signals with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The proposed method is characterized by applying low-rank decomposition for saliency detection of spectrogram. MATLAB simulation results verify that the proposed method is effective in saliency detection of the spectrogram from rotor blade echo signals and is robust in estimating the maximum micro-Doppler shift under low SNR.