Micro-Doppler signatures of underwater vehicles using acoustic radar

Scattered radar returns from non-rigid moving bodies show distinct micro-Doppler features in the joint time-frequency space. As a result, Doppler spectrograms are useful feature vectors for identification and classification of aerial and ground based targets such as helicopters, humans and animals. In this paper, we present the micro-Doppler signatures of two underwater unmanned vehicles (UUV) from simulated acoustic radar data. The vehicles and radar are assumed to be fully submerged underwater. The radar scattered returns are generated using primitive based modeling of the vehicles at 30KHz. We consider two types of motions - vehicles move tangentially with respect to the radar and vehicles move radially towards the radar.