Multi-Frequency Radar Micro-Doppler Based Classification of Micro-Drone Payload Weight

The use of drones for recreational, commercial and military purposes has seen a rapid increase in recent years. The ability of counter-drone detection systems to sense whether a drone is carrying a payload is of strategic importance as this can help determine the potential threat level posed by a detected drone. This paper presents the use of micro-Doppler signatures collected using radar systems operating at three different frequency bands for the classification of carried payload of two different micro-drones performing two different motions. Use of a KNN classifier with six features extracted from micro-Doppler signatures enabled mean payload classification accuracies of 80.95, 72.50 and 86.05%, for data collected at S-band, C-band and W-band, respectively, when the drone type and motion type are unknown. The impact on classification performance of different amounts of situational information is also evaluated in this paper.