Doppler frequency estimation and the Cramer-Rao bound

Abstract

Addresses the problem of Doppler frequency estimation in the presence of speckle and receiver noise. An ultimate accuracy bound for Doppler frequency estimation is derived from the Cramer-Rao inequality. It is shown that estimates based on the correlation of the signal power spectra with an arbitrary weighting function are approximately Gaussian-distributed. Their variance is derived in terms of the weighting function. It is shown that a special case of a correlation-based estimator is a maximum-likelihood estimator that reaches the Cramer-Rao bound. These general results are applied to the problem of Doppler centroid estimation from SAR (synthetic aperture radar) data.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>