DIAT-μSAT: Small Aerial Targets’ Micro-Doppler Signatures and Their Classification Using CNN

Protective measures against small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vital from a national security perspective. As a result, the importance of surveillance systems that automatically identify and classify low radar cross section (RCS) aerial targets increases. In this work, an indigenously developed continuous wave (CW) (X-band: 10 GHz) radar is used to build a diversified “DIAT- SAT” dataset comprising 4849 micro-Doppler signature images of five different small aerial targets. We also proposed a transfer learning-based deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) approach for classifying low RCS aerial targets. We demonstrated the classification accuracy of 95% and 97%, with VGG16 and VGG19 as feature extractors, respectively, with minimal false-negative and -positive results. The open-field experimental classes covered in this work are: 1) a two-blade rotor; 2) a three-short-blade rotor; 3) a three-long-blade rotor; 4) a quadcopter; 5) a bionic bird; and 6) a two-blade-rotor and bionic bird. We also observed a good classification accuracy (>97%) when more than one target is operated simultaneously.