EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 727034, 9 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/727034
Research Article

Adaptive Algorithm for Chirp-Rate Estimation

Igor Djurović,1 Cornel Ioana (EURASIP Member),2 Ljubiša Stanković,1 and Pu Wang3

1Electrical Engineering Department, University of Montenegro, Cetinjski put bb, 81000 Podgorica, Montenegro
2Gipsa Lab, INP Grenoble, 38402 Grenoble, France
3Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

Received 5 March 2009; Accepted 26 June 2009

Academic Editor: Vitor Nascimento

Copyright © 2009 Igor Djurović et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Chirp-rate, as a second derivative of signal phase, is an important feature of nonstationary signals in numerous applications such as radar, sonar, and communications. In this paper, an adaptive algorithm for the chirp-rate estimation is proposed. It is based on the confidence intervals rule and the cubic-phase function. The window width is adaptively selected to achieve good tradeoff between bias and variance of the chirp-rate estimate. The proposed algorithm is verified by simulations and the results show that it outperforms the standard algorithm with fixed window width.