With the development of drone technology, concerns have arisen about the possibility of drones being equipped with threat payloads for terrorism and other crimes. A drone detection system that can detect drones carrying payloads is needed. A drone’s propeller rotation frequency increases with payload weight. Therefore, a method for estimating propeller rotation frequency will effectively detect the presence or absence of a payload and its weight. In this paper, we propose a method for classifying the payload weight of a drone by estimating its propeller rotation frequency from radar images obtained using a millimeter-wave fast-chirp-modulation multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) radar. For each drone model, the proposed method requires a pre-prepared reference dataset that establishes the relationships between the payload weight and propeller rotation frequency. Two experimental measurement cases were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of our proposal. In case 1, we assessed four drones (DJI Matrice 600, DJI Phantom 3, DJI Mavic Pro, and DJI Mavic Mini) to determine whether the propeller rotation frequency of any drone could be correctly estimated. In case 2, experiments were conducted on a hovering Phantom 3 drone with several payloads in a stable position for calculating the accuracy of the payload weight classification. The experimental results indicated that the proposed method could estimate the propeller rotation frequency of any drone and classify payloads in a 250 g step with high accuracy.

In this paper, we report an experimental and numerical analysis of ultrahigh-speed coherent Nyquist pulse transmission. First, we describe a low-nonlinearity dispersion compensator for ultrahigh-speed coherent Nyquist pulse transmission; it is composed of a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) and a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) device. By adopting CFBG instead of inverse dispersion fiber, the nonlinearity in a 160km transmission line was more than halved. Furthermore, by eliminating the group delay fluctuation of the CFBG with an LCoS device, the residual group delay was reduced to as low as 1.42ps over an 11nm bandwidth. Then, by using the transmission line with the newly constructed low-nonlinearity dispersion compensator, we succeeded in improving the BER performance of single-channel 15.3Tbit/s-160km transmission by one-third compared with that of a conventional dispersion-managed transmission line and obtained a spectral efficiency of 8.7bit/s/Hz. Furthermore, we numerically analyzed the BER performance of its Nyquist pulse transmission. The numerical results showed that the nonlinear impairment in the transmission line is the main factor limiting the transmission performance in a coherent Nyquist pulse transmission, which becomes more significant at higher baud rates.

A new structure of the electro-optic modulator to compensate the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) is introduced. The modulator includes two Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) operating with frequency chirp and the two modulated outputs are combined with an adequate phase difference. We revealed by theoretical analysis and numerical calculations that the IMD3 components in the receiver output could be selectively suppressed when the two MZMs operate with chirp parameters of opposite signs to each other. Spectral power of the IMD3 components in the proposed modulator was more than 15dB lower than that in a normal Mach-Zehnder modulator at modulation index between 0.15π and 0.25π rad. The IMD3 compensation properties of the proposed modulator was experimentally confirmed by using a dual parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPMZM) structure. We designed and fabricated the modulator with the single-chip structure and the single-input operation by integrating with 180° hybrid coupler on the modulator substrate. Modulation signals were applied to each modulation electrode by the 180° hybrid coupler to set the chirp parameters of two MZMs of the DPMZM. The properties of the fabricated modulator were measured by using 10GHz two-tone signals. The performance of the IMD3 compensation agreed with that in the calculation. It was confirmed that the IMD3 compensation could be realized even by the fabricated modulator structure.

This paper proposes a chirp-BOK modulation scheme for VLF (Very low frequency, 3-30kHz) communication under symmetric alpha-stable (SαS) noise. The atmospheric noise which is the main interference in VLF communication is more accurately characterized as SαS distribution in the previous literatures. Chirp-BOK, one of the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technologies is widely used for its anti-interference performance and constant envelope properties. However, up-chirp and down-chirp are not strictly orthogonal, the bit error rate (BER) performance of chirp-BOK system is no longer improved with the increase of time-bandwidth product. So in this paper, the influence of non-orthogonal modulation waveform on the system is considered, and the model of the optimal parameters for chirp-BOK is derived from the perspective of minimum BER under gaussian noise and SαS noise respectively. Simulations for chirp-BOK scheme under gaussian noise and SαS noise with different α validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The modern radar signals are in a wide frequency space. The receiving bandwidth of the radar reconnaissance receiver should be wide enough to intercept the modern radar signals. The Nyquist folding receiver (NYFR) is a novel wideband receiving architecture and it has a high intercept probability. Chirp signals are widely used in modern radar system. Because of the wideband receiving ability, the NYFR will receive the concurrent multiple chirp signals. In this letter, we propose a novel parameter estimation algorithm for the multiple chirp signals intercepted by single channel NYFR. Compared with the composite NYFR, the proposed method can save receiving resources. In addition, the proposed approach can estimate the parameters of the chirp signals even the NYFR outputs are under frequency aliasing circumstance. Simulation results show the efficacy of the proposed method.

Phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) has unique properties, such as the quantum-limited noise figure of 0 dB and the phase clamping effect. This study investigates PSA characteristics when a chirped pulse is incident. The signal gain, the output waveform, and the noise figure for an optical pulse having been chirped through chromatic dispersion or self-phase modulation before amplification are analyzed. The results indicate that the amplification properties for a chirped pulse are different from those of a non-chirped pulse, such that the signal gain is small, the waveform is distorted, and the noise figure is degraded.

Excitation of Extremely Low Frequency (ELF)/Very Low Frequency (VLF) from ionosphere,which is artificial modulated by High Frequency (HF) waves can provide a way of antenna generation for deep submarine communication. In this paper, based on plasma energy conservation equation, the theoretical model of amplitude modulation HF pump heating low ionosphere for ELF/VLF generation is established. The linear frequency modulation technique of up-chirp and down-chirp have good self-correlation and cross-correlation, by which information can be transmitted by up-chirp and down-chirp. Thus, the linear frequency modulation technique can be applied to the ionosphere ELF/VLF communication. Based on this, a Chirp-BOK (Binary Orthogonal Keying) communication scheme is proposed. Indeed the Chirp-BOK amplitude and power modulation function are designed by combining the linear frequency modulation technique with the square wave amplitude modulation technique. The simulation results show in the condition that the ionosphere is heated by the Chirp-BOK power modulation HF waves, the temperature of ionospheric electronic and the variations of conductivity have obvious frequency modulation characteristics which are the same as that of power modulation, so does the variation of ionospheric current. Thus, when the ionosphere is heated by Chirp-BOK power modulation HF waves, the up-chirp (symbol ‘0’) and down-chirp (symbol ‘1’) ELF/VLF signals can be generated.

Frequency chirp of a semiconductor laser is controlled by using hybrid modulation, which simultaneously modulates intra-cavity loss and injection current to the laser. The positive adiabatic chirp of injection-current modulation is compensated with the negative adiabatic chirp created by intra-cavity-loss modulation, which enhances the chromatic-dispersion tolerance of the laser. A proof-of-concept transmission experiment confirmed that the hybrid modulation laser has a larger dispersion tolerance than conventional directly modulated lasers due to the negative frequency chirp originating from intra-cavity-loss modulation.

This paper proposes an effective continuous super-resolution (CSR) algorithm for the multipath channel estimation. By designing a preamble including up-chirp and down-chirp symbols, the Doppler shift and multipath delay are estimated jointly by using convex programming. Simulation results show that the proposed CSR can achieve better detection probability of the number of multipaths than the eigenvalue based methods. Moreover, compared with conventional super-resolution techniques, such as MUSIC and ESPRIT methods, the proposed CSR algorithm demonstrates its advantage in root mean square error of the Doppler shift and multipath delay, especially for the closely located paths within low SNR.

A chirp spread spectrum (CSS) system uses a chirp signal which changes the instantaneous frequency according to time for spreading a transmission bandwidth. In the CSS system, the transmission performance can be simply improved by increasing the time-bandwidth product which is known as the processing gain. However, increasing the transmission bandwidth is limited because of the spectrum regulation. In this letter, we propose a correlation-based chirp rate allocation method to improve the transmission performance by analyzing the cross-correlation coefficient in the same time-bandwidth product. In order to analyze the transmission performance of the proposed method, we analytically derive the cross-correlation coefficient according to the time-bandwidth separation product and simulate the transmission performance. The simulation results show that the proposed method can analytically allocate the optimal chirp rate and improve the transmission performance.

This paper proposes a method of watermarking for digital audio signals based on adaptive phase modulation. Audio signals are usually non-stationary, i.e., their own characteristics are time-variant. The features for watermarking are usually not selected by combining the principle of variability, which affects the performance of the whole watermarking system. The proposed method embeds a watermark into an audio signal by adaptively modulating its phase with the watermark using IIR all-pass filters. The frequency location of the pole-zero of an IIR all-pass filter that characterizes the transfer function of the filter is adapted on the basis of signal power distribution on sub-bands in a magnitude spectrum domain. The pole-zero locations are adapted so that the phase modulation produces slight distortion in watermarked signals to achieve the best sound quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method could embed inaudible watermarks into various kinds of audio signals and correctly detect watermarks without the aid of original signals. A reasonable trade-off between inaudibility and robustness could be obtained by balancing the phase modulation scheme. The proposed method can embed a watermark into audio signals up to 100 bits per second with 99% accuracy and 6 bits per second with 94.3% accuracy in the cases of no attack and attacks, respectively.

Range estimation based on time of arrival (TOA) is becoming increasingly important with the emergence of location-based applications and next-generation location-aware wireless sensor networks. For radar and positioning systems, chirp signals have primarily been used due to their inborn signal properties for decomposition. Recently, chirp signal has been selected as the baseline standard of ISO/IEC 24730-5 and IEEE 802.15.4a in 2.4GHz, organized for the development of a real-time accurate positioning system. When estimating the TOA of the received signals in multipath channel, the super-resolution algorithms, known as estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT), multiple signal classification method (MUSIC) and matrix pencil (MP), are preferred due to their superiority in decomposing the received paths. For the super-resolution algorithm-based TOA estimation of chirp signals, the received chirp signals must be transformed into a sinusoidal form for the super-resolution algorithm. The conventional transformation, the de-chirping technique, changes the received chirp signals to sinusoids so that the super-resolution algorithms can estimate the TOA of the received chirp signals through a frequency estimation of the transformed sinusoids. In practice, the initial timing synchronizer at receiver tries to find the maximum energy point at which the received paths are overlapped maximally. At this time, the conventional de-chirping yields lossy transformed sinusoids for the first arrival path from the received samples synchronized to the maximum energy point. The first arrival path is not involved in the transformed sinusoids with the conventional transformation, leading to performance degradation. However, the proposed energy efficient time-frequency transformation achieves lossless transformation by using the extended reference chirp signals. The proposed transformation is incorporated with MUSIC-based TOA estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed transformation is analyzed and verified. The root mean squared error (RMSE) of the proposed transformation is compared with Cramer-Rao lower bound and those for the conventional algorithms such as super-resolution, ESPRIT and matrix pencil algorithm in multipath channel.

An electro-optic (EO) modulator integrated with the microwave planar circuit directly formed on a LiNbO3 (LN) substrate for low frequency-chirp performance and compact configuration is introduced. Frequency chirp of EO intensity modulators was investigated and a dual-electrode Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator combined with a microwave rat-race (RR) circuit was considered for the low-chirp modulation. The RR circuit, which operates as a 180-degree hybrid, was designed on a z-cut LN substrate to create two modulation signals of the same amplitude in anti-phase with each other from a single input signal. Output ports of the RR were connected to the modulation electrodes on the substrate. The two signals of the equal amplitude drive two phase modulation parts of the modulator so that the symmetric interference are realized to obtain intensity modulation of low frequency-chirp. The modulator was designed and fabricated on a single LN substrate for around 10 GHz modulation frequencies and 1550 nm light wavelength. The chirp parameters were measured to be less than 0.2 in the frequency range between 8 and 12 GHz. By compensating imbalance of the light power splitting in the waveguide MZ interferometer the chirp could be reduced even more.

We previously proposed an inaudible non-blind digital-audio watermarking approach based on cochlear delay (CD) characteristics. There are, however, three remaining issues with regard to blind-detectability, frame synchronization related to confidentiality, and reversibility. We attempted to solve these issues in developing the proposed approach by taking blind-detectability and reversibility of audio watermarking into consideration. Frame synchronization was also incorporated into the proposed approach to improve confidentiality. We evaluated inaudibility, robustness, and reversibility with the new approach by carrying out three objective tests (PEAQ, LSD, and bit-detection or SNR) and six robustness tests. The results revealed that inaudible, robust, blindly-detectable, and semi-reversible watermarking based on CD could be accomplished.

A generalized chirp-like (GCL) sequence of period N is constructed by modulating a Zadoff-Chu sequence of period N with an arbitrary unimodular sequence of period m, where m divides N. Under some specific conditions, the cross-correlations between two GCL sequences are shown to have exactly the same magnitudes as those of their corresponding Zadoff-Chu sequences regardless of the employed unimodular sequences. In this paper, we first investigate the sufficient conditions under which such a relation holds. We then use them to construct a new class of optimal zero-correlation zone (ZCZ) sequence sets which can be considered to be an extension of the so-called GCL-ZCZ sequence sets.

The combined linear frequency modulation continuous wave (LFMCW) and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) can be used for imaging long-distance targets because of its long-distance and high resolution imaging abilities. In this paper, we find and study the dechirp distortion phenomenon (DDP) for imaging long-distance targets by a dechirp-on-receive LFMCW radar. If the targets are very far from the radar, the maximum delay-time is not much smaller than a single sweep duration, and the dechirp distortion is triggered since the distance of the target is unknown in a LFMCW-ISAR system. DDP cannot be ignored in long-distance imaging because double images of a target appear in the frequency domain, which reduces resolution and degrades image quality. A novel LFMCW-ISAR signal model is established to analyze DDP and its negative effects on long-distance target imaging. Using the proportionately distributed energy of double images, the authors propose a method to correct dechirp distortion. In addition, the applicable scope of the proposed method is also discussed. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this letter, we present a novel timing offset estimation method for chirp-based communication systems which is robust against frequency offset. For robust timing offset estimation, we propose a partial cross-correlation and differential multiplication method using up and down chirp symbols. The performances of the proposed estimator in indoor multipath channel model provided by IEEE 802.15.4a standard are presented in terms of mean-square error (MSE) obtained by computer simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed estimator has a significantly smaller MSE than the conventional estimators.

In this letter, we analyze the effect of the size of observed data on the performance of time delay estimation (TDE) in the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) system. By adjusting the size of observed data, we reduce the effect of DC offsets, which would otherwise degrade the performance of TDE based on CSS, and we optimize the performance of TDE in CSS system. Finally, we derive the optimal size of observed data of TDE in CSS system.

A new estimation algorithm of clock drift in symbol duration for high precision ranging, based on multiple symbols of chirp spread spectrum (CSS) is proposed. Since the permissible error of a crystal oscillator in CSS is relatively high given the need to lower device costs, ranging results are perturbed by clock drift. We establish the phenomenon of clock drift in multiple symbols of CSS, and estimate the clock drift in symbol duration based on phase difference between adjacent symbols. The proposed algorithm is analyzed, and verified by Monte Carlo simulations.

The relationship between the degree of overlap in direct modulation chirp spread spectrum systems with binary phase shift keying and intersymbol interference (ISI) is analyzed. It is observed that the ISI due to overlap fluctuates or monotonically increases as the number of overlaps changes and that, in some cases, the overlap does not incur ISI at all.