The rotation of rotor blades of a helicopter induces a Doppler modulation around the main Doppler shift. Such a non-stationary modulation, commonly called micro-Doppler signature, can be used to perform classification of the target. In this paper a model-based automatic helicopter classification algorithm is presented. A sparse signal model for radar return from a helicopter is developed and by means of the theory of sparse signal recovery, the characteristic parameters of the target are extracted and used for the classification. This approach does not require any learning process of a training set or adaptive processing of the received signal. Moreover, it is robust with respect to the initial position of the blades and the angle that the LOS forms with the perpendicular to the plane on which the blades lie. The proposed approach is tested on simulated and real data.
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