Abstract: A system and method is presented for detecting and classifying slow-moving and hovering helicopters from a missile's look-down Doppler radar that is compatible with the existing base of Doppler radars. This approach uses definable attributes of a helicopter rotor assembly and its extended Doppler rotor return to differentiate “rotor samples” from other samples (steps 123, 125), extract features such as bandwidth, activity, angle, and shape from the rotor samples (step 127), and classify a potential target as a helicopter or other based on the extracted rotor features and the known attributes of the helicopter rotor assembly (step 129). A target report including a classification target, range, range-rate, and angle of the extended rotor return is suitably passed to a tracking processor (step 121).

Abstract: A system and method is presented for detecting and classifying slow-moving and hovering helicopters from a missile's took-down Doppler radar that is compatible with the existing base of Doppler radars. This approach uses definable attributes of a helicopter rotor assembly and its extended Doppler rotor return to differentiate “rotor samples” from other samples (steps 123, 125), extract features such as bandwidth, activity, angle, and shape from the rotor samples (step 127), and classify a potential target as a helicopter or other based on the extracted rotor features and the known attributes of the helicopter rotor assembly (step 129). A target report including a classification target, range, range-rate, and angle of the extended rotor return is suitably passed to a tracking processor (step 121).