scatterer, η
i,m
is the phase coefficient and
F
i
=−
4
p
l
R
0
, i = 1, 2, ..., Q
h
i,m
=
1
m
V
m−1
· R
i
× r
, i = 1, 2, ..., Q
⎧
⎪
⎨
⎪
⎩
(8)
We can see from (7) that the received signal in a range bin can be
characterised as multi-component AM–FM signal for the complex
motion of the target.
3 Cubic Chirplet decomposition and ISAR
imaging algorithm
3.1 Traditional Chirplet decomposition
The Chirplet decomposition for signal s(t) decomposes it into terms
of well-defined and localised energy components, and consequently
the localised time–frequency variations can be captured for the
signal. The Chirplet atom is defined as follows [28]
g
k
(t) =
1
ps
2
k
4
exp −
(t − t
k
)
2
2
s
2
k
+ j
v
k
(t − t
k
) + j
b
k
(t − t
k
)
2
(9)
where the parameter (t
k
, ω
k
) ∈ R determines the time and frequency
centres for the chirp function, β
k
∈ R denotes the chirp rate and the
variance σ
k
∈ R
+
controls the width for the chirp function. Then,
the signal s(t) can be expressed as
s(t) =
1
k=0
C
k
g
k
(t) (10)
where C
k
is the weighted coefficient.
Some efficient algorithms for the Chirplet decomposition have
recently been proposed, which has been introduced in [34–37].
Here, we consider an example where the Chirplet decomposition is
applied to a signal consisting of two cubic chirps as the form of
(7), and the parameters are shown in Table 1, where t ∈ [ −2s,2s]
and the sampling frequency is 64 Hz. Fig. 2a is the Wigner–Ville
distribution (WVD) for the signal; Fig. 2b is the WVD after the
Chirplet decomposition. We can see that the Chirplet
decomposition is an efficient way to analyse the multi-component
cubic chirp signals, but the Chirplet atom still has the form of
LFM signal, and cannot characterise the complicated polynomial
phase signals with more accuracy, especially in the joint for the
two Chirplet components.
Remark 1: The WVD is a bilinear TFD [27], and thus it suffers from
the cross-term for multi-component signals. This is obvious in
Fig. 2a, and the auto-term cannot be detected correctly with the
influence of the cross term. After the Chirplet decomposition, the
original signal can be represented as the sum of weighted Chirplet
atoms, as shown in (9) and (10). The Chirplet atom has the form
of a LFM signal with Gaussian envelope, and it can be well
represented by the WVD with optimal time–frequency resolution,
which can be seen from Fig. 2b. Furthermore, the cross-term can
be avoided after the Chirplet decomposition. This is very
significant for the analysis of multi-component signal. The
‘relative time’ and ‘relative frequency’ in Fig. 2 represent the
number of samplings in the time and frequency domains,
respectively, and are not the true values of time and frequency.
In order to improve the analysis performance of multi-component
signals with high non-linear instantaneous frequency trajectories,
such as the aforementioned two-component cubic chirps, the cubic
Chirplet decomposition is more appropriate than the traditional
Chirplet decomposition. The cubic Chirplet atom can match the
complicated signals with high precision, and it is proposed in [38]
as a modified version of Chirplet atom. In this paper, an efficient
algorithm for cubic Chirplet decomposition is proposed, which is
introduced in Section 3.2.
3.2 Cubic Chirplet decomposition
The cubic Chirplet atom is defined as follows by introducing a
curvature parameter γ
k
to the conventional Chirplet atom in [38]
h
k
(t) =
1
ps
2
k
4
exp −
(t − t
k
)
2
2
s
2
k
+ j
v
k
(t − t
k
)
+j
b
k
(t − t
k
)
2
+ j
g
k
(t − t
k
)
3
(11)
Compared with the conventional Chirplet atom in (9), we can notice
that the cubic Chirplet atom consists of further multiplying g
k
(t) with
the term exp[ jγ
k
(t − t
k
)
3
]. The curvature parameter γ
k
has a bending
effect and it is particularly effective to track the evolution against
Table 1 Parameters of the simulated signal
Components (i) A
i
(t) Φ
i
η
i,1
η
i,2
η
i,3
1 2 0 1.2π
1
2
× 2.3
1
3
× 5
2 1 0 0.2π
1
2
× 1.3 −
1
3
× 14
Fig. 2 Time–frequency representations for two-component cubic chirps
a WVD
b WVD after Chirplet decomposition
c RSPWVD after cubic Chirplet decomposition
IET Signal Process., 2015, Vol. 9, Iss. 5, pp. 419–429
421
&
The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015