Efficient Estimation of the Helicopter Blade Parameter by Independent Component Analysis

We propose an efficient method to estimate various parameters of a helicopter blade including the number Bnum and the length by separating the blade signal using independent component analysis (ICA) and an analytic solution obtained by monostatic/bistatic geometry. The proposed method is composed of two parts, one for even Bnum and one for odd Bnum. For even Bnum the blade parameters are estimated using ICA plus analytic estimation. For odd Bnum the parameters are estimated using two ICAs plus analytic estimation. Experimental results using the radar signal of a blade model calculated by physical optics demonstrate that the proposed method successfully separates the blade signals for both even and odd Bnums and estimates parameters with high accuracy.