Search Results (15)

A linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal and its corresponding de-chirp operation are one of the basic methods for wideband radar signal processing, which can reduce the burden of the radar system sampling rate and is more suitable for large-bandwidth signal processing. More importantly, most existing methods against interrupted sampling repeater jamming (ISRJ) are based on time–frequency (TF) or frequency domain analysis of the de-chirped signal. However, the above anti-ISRJ methods cannot be directly applied to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar with multiple beams, because the angular waveform (AW) in mainlobe directions does not possess the TF properties of the LFM signal. Consequently, this work focuses on the co-optimization of transmit beampattern and AW similarity in wideband MIMO radar systems. Different from the existing works, which only concern the space–frequency pattern of the transmit waveform, we recast the transmit beampattern and AW expressions for wideband MIMO radar in a more compact form. Based on the compact expressions, a co-optimization model of the transmit beampattern and AWs is formulated where the similarity constraint is added to force the AW to share the TF properties of the LFM signal. An algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework is proposed to address the aforementioned problem. Numerical simulations show that the optimized waveform can form the desired transmit beampattern and its AWs have similar TF properties and de-chirp results to the LFM signal. Full article

Wideband radar is becoming increasingly significant in modern radar systems. However, traditional monopulse angle estimation techniques are not suitable for wideband targets exhibiting range extension effects. To address this, we explore the angle estimation problem for wideband Linear Frequency-Modulated (LFM) signals and propose a new monopulse angle estimation algorithm tailored for range-spread targets. In this paper, the phase of the highest energy scatterer is used as the reference to compensate for the phases of other scatterers. The compensated scatterers are then accumulated for energy focusing. Finally, the angle of the energy-focused signal is estimated using the sum-and-difference amplitude comparison method. The proposed method can effectively focus the scatterers’ energy. Moreover, since the echo of a range-spread target can be regarded as the sum of sinusoids with different frequencies, scatterer energy focusing can effectively improve the performance of the detector. To further demonstrate the practicality of the proposed angle estimation method, it is combined with the detector to evaluate its performance. Simulation results comparing the proposed method with other approaches validate its effectiveness and demonstrate that it achieves a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold and higher angular accuracy. Through the proposed method, tracking and imaging can be achieved entirely within the wideband radar framework. The proposed method can also be extended to other sensor systems, advancing the development of sensor technologies. Full article

Modern radar technology requires high-quality signals and detection performance. However, traditional frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar often has poor anti-jamming capabilities, and the high sampling rates associated with large time-bandwidth product signals can lead to increased system hardware costs and reduced data processing efficiency. This paper constructed a composite radar waveform based on noise frequency modulation (NFM) and linear frequency modulation (LFM) signals, enhancing the signal’s complexity and anti-jamming capability. Furthermore, a method for optimizing the processing of echo signals based on de-chirp and delay matching is proposed. The locally generated LFM signal is used to de-chirp the received echoes, resulting in a narrowband difference frequency noise signal. Subsequently, delay matching is performed in the fast time domain using the locally generated NFM signal according to the number of sampling points in the traversal processing period, allowing for the acquisition of target delay information. While reducing the analog-to-digital (A/D) sampling rate, the detection performance for wideband echo signals under high sampling rates is still maintained, with sidelobe levels and range resolution preserved. Accumulating this information in the slow time domain enables accurate target detection. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through simulation experiments. Full article

By means of alteration of the transmitted linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal waveform parameters, such as pulse width or chirp rate, initial phase, pulse repetition interval (PRI), and chirp rate polarity at every position of synthetic apertures, the pseudo-random agility technology of interpulse waveform parameters in airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) actively increases the complexity and uncertainty of radar waveforms. This technology confuses jamming interception receivers, thus improving its anti-interference ability for active coherent jamming, which is one of the main research interests of airborne SAR technology. But the pseudo-random agility technology for interpulse waveform parameters faces certain challenges of large computation and complex system design, which need to be further studied and solved. To address these issues, a processing scheme of high-resolution SAR image formation which is appropriate for agile interpulse waveform parameters is proposed in this paper. This method can deal with multiple agile parameters, not only single ones as in most existing literature. Its computation load is nearly comparable to that of traditional SAR image formation with constant waveform parameters. The high-resolution SAR imaging results obtained by processing SAR raw data with agile interpulse waveform parameters demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, real SAR images with resolutions of 0.5 m and 0.15 m, which are rarely found in the public literature, are shown under the circumstance of randomly changing the transmitted wideband LFM signal pulse parameters one by one. Full article

This paper addresses the challenges of wideband signal beamforming in radar systems and proposes a new calibration method. Due to operating conditions, the frequency-dependent characteristics of the system can be changed, and the amplitude, phase, and time delay error can be generated. The proposed method is based on the concept of the sliding window algorithm for linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals. To calibrate the frequency-dependent errors from the transceiver and the time delay error from the true time delay elements, the proposed method utilizes the characteristic of the LFM signal. The LFM signal changes its frequency linearly with time, and the frequency domain characteristics of the hardware are presented in time. Therefore, by applying a matched filter to a part of the LFM signal, the frequency-dependent characteristics can be monitored and calibrated. The proposed method is compared with the conventional matched filter-based calibration results and verified by simulation results and beampatterns. Since the proposed method utilizes LFM signal as the calibration tone, the proposed method can be applied to any beamforming systems, not limited to LFM radars. Full article

Accurate direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of wideband, low-power nonstationary signals is important in many radio frequency (RF) applications. This article analyses the performance of two incoherent aggregation techniques for the DOA estimation of high chirp-rate linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals used in modern radar and electronic warfare (EW) applications. The aim is to determine suitable aggregation techniques for blind DOA estimation for real-time implementation with a frequency channelised signal. The first technique calculates a single pseudospectrum by directly combining the spatial covariance matrices from each of the frequency bins. The second technique first calculates the spatial pseudospectra from the spatial covariance matrix (SCM) from each frequency bin and then combines the spatial pseudospectra into one single estimate. Firstly, for single and multiple signal emitters, we compare the DOA estimation performance of incoherent SCM-based aggregation with that of the incoherent spatial pseudospectra-based aggregation using the root mean-squared error (RMSE). Secondly, we determine the types of signals and conditions for which these incoherent aggregation techniques are more suited. We demonstrate that the low-complexity SCM-based aggregation technique can achieve relatively good estimation performance compared to the pseudospectra-based aggregation technique for multiple narrowband signal detection. However, pseudospectra aggregation is better suited for single wideband emitter detection. Both the incoherent aggregation techniques presented in this article offer a computational advantage over the coherent processing techniques and hence are better suited for real-time implementation. Full article

Radar unconventional active jamming, including unconventional deceptive jamming and barrage jamming, poses a serious threat to wideband radars. This paper proposes an unconventional-active-jamming recognition method for wideband radar. In this method, the visibility algorithm of converting the radar time series into graphs, called visibility graphs, is first given. Then, the visibility graph of the linear-frequency-modulation (LFM) signal is proved to be a regular graph, and the rationality of extracting features on visibility graphs is theoretically explained. Therefore, four features on visibility graphs, average degree, average clustering coefficient, Newman assortativity coefficient, and normalized network-structure entropy, are extracted from visibility graphs. Finally, a random-forests (RF) classifier is chosen for unconventional-active-jamming recognition. Experiment results show that recognition probability was over 90% when the jamming-to-noise ratio (JNR) was above 0 dB. Full article

The Nyquist folding receiver (NYFR) can achieve a high-probability interception of an ultra-wideband (UWB) signal with fewer devices, while the output of the NYFR is converted into a hybrid modulated signal of the local oscillator (LO) and the received signal, which requires the matching parameter estimation methods. The linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal is a typical low probability of intercept (LPI) radar signal. In this paper, an estimation method of both the Nyquist Zone (NZ) index and the chirp rate for the LFM signal intercepted by NYFR was proposed. First, according to the time-frequency characteristics of the LFM signal, the accurate NZ and the rough chirp rate was estimated based on least squares (LS) and random sample consensus (RANSAC). Then, the information of the LO was removed from the hybrid modulated signal by the known NZ, and the precise chirp rate was obtained by using the fractional Fourier transform (FrFT). Moreover, a fast search method of FrFT optimal order was presented, which could obviously reduce the computational complexity. The simulation demonstrated that the proposed method could precisely estimate the parameters of the hybrid modulated output signal of the NYFR. Full article

To overcome the limitation of performance degradation of existing methods based on fractional Fourier transform in impulsive noise, and fractional lower-order statistics based method dependence on a priori knowledge of the noise, a novel Sigmoid fractional Fourier transform (Sigmoid-FRFT) is presented in this paper. This novel approach is then used to estimate the Doppler stretch and time delay. Furthermore, the properties of the Sigmoid transform, robustness and boundedness of the Sigmoid-FRFT to the $S\alpha S$ noise, and the computation complexity of the Sigmoid-FRFT method are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Simulation results and theoretical analysis are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the forgoing method. It is shown that the proposed method not only can effectively suppress impulsive noise interference but also does not need a priori knowledge of the noise, with higher estimation accuracy and lower computational complexity in impulsive noise environments. Full article

This paper proposes a switched-element direction finding (SEDF) system based Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation method for un-cooperative wideband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multi Linear Frequency Modulation (OFDM-LFM) radar signals. This method is designed to improve the problem that most DOA algorithms occupy numbers of channel and computational resources to handle the direction finding for wideband signals. Then, an iterative spatial parameter estimator is designed through deriving the analytical steering vector of the intercepted OFDM-LFM signal by the SEDF system, which can remarkably mitigate the dispersion effect that is caused by high chirp rate. Finally, the algorithm flow and numerical simulations are given to corroborate the feasibility and validity of our proposed DOA method. Full article

Narrow-band interference (NBI) and Wide-band interference (WBI) are critical issues for synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which degrades the imaging quality severely. Since some complex signals can be modeled as linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals within a short time, LFM-WBI and NBI are mainly discussed in this paper. Due to its excellent energy concentration and useful properties (i.e., auto-terms pass through the origin of Delay-Doppler plane while cross-terms are away from it), a novel nonparametric interference suppression method using Delay-Doppler iterative decomposition algorithm is proposed. This algorithm consists of three stages. First, we present signal synthesis method (SSM) from ambiguity function (AF) and cross ambiguity function (CAF) based on the matrix rearrangement and eigenvalue decomposition. Compared with traditional SSM from Wigner distribution (WD), the proposed SSM can synthesize a signal faster and more accurately. Then, based on unique properties in Delay-Doppler domain, a mask algorithm is applied for interference identification and extraction using Radon and its inverse transformation. Finally, a signal iterative decomposition algorithm (IDA) is utilized to subtract the largest interference from the received signal one by one. After that, a well-focused SAR imagery is obtained by conventional imaging methods. The simulation and measured data results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only suppresses interference efficiently but also preserves the useful information as much as possible. Full article

In this paper, a novel method, that employs a fractional Fourier transform and a tuneable Sigmoid transform, is proposed, in order to estimate the Doppler stretch and time delay of wideband echoes for a linear frequency modulation (LFM) pulse radar in an alpha-stable distribution noise environment. Two novel functions, a tuneable Sigmoid fractional correlation function (TS-FC) and a tuneable Sigmoid fractional power spectrum density (TS-FPSD), are presented in this paper. The novel algorithm based on the TS-FPSD is then proposed to estimate the Doppler stretch and the time delay. Then, the derivation of unbiasedness and consistency is presented. Furthermore, the boundness of the TS-FPSD to the symmetric alpha stable ( $S\alpha S$ ) noise, the parameter selection of the TS-FPSD, and the feasibility analysis of the TS-FPSD, are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. In addition, the Cramér–Rao bound for parameter estimation is derived and computed in closed form, which shows that better performance has been achieved. Simulation results and theoretical analysis are presented, to demonstrate the applicability of the forgoing method. It is shown that the proposed method can not only effectively suppress impulsive noise interference, but it also does not need a priori knowledge of the noise with higher estimation accuracy in alpha-stable distribution noise environments. Full article

The Nyquist Folding Receiver (NYFR) is a novel ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver structure that can realize wideband signal monitoring with fewer components. The NYFR induces a Nyquist zone (NZ)-dependent sinusoidal frequency modulation (SFM) by a modulated local oscillator (LOS), and the intercepted linear frequency modulated (LFM) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signal will be converted into an LFM/SFM hybrid modulated signal. In this paper, a parameter estimation algorithm is proposed for the complicated NYFR output signal. According to the NYFR prior information, a chirp singular value ratio (CSVR) spectrum method based on singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed to estimate the chirp rate directly before estimating the NZ index. Then, a fast search algorithm based on golden section method for the CSVR spectrum is analyzed, which can obviously reduce the computational complexity. The simulation shows that the presented algorithm can accurately estimate the parameters of the LFM/SFM hybrid modulated output signal by the NYFR. Full article

In wideband radar systems, the performance of motion parameters estimation can significantly affect the performance of object detection and the quality of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging. Although the traditional motion parameters estimation methods can reduce the range migration (RM) and Doppler frequency migration (DFM) effects in ISAR imaging, the computational complexity is high. In this paper, we propose a new fast non-parameter-searching method for motion parameters estimation based on the cross-correlation of adjacent echoes (CCAE) for wideband LFM signals. A cross-correlation operation is carried out for two adjacent echo signals, then the motion parameters can be calculated by estimating the frequency of the correlation result. The proposed CCAE method can be applied directly to the stretching system, which is commonly adopted in wideband radar systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the new method can achieve better estimation performances, with much lower computational cost, compared with existing methods. The experimental results on real radar datasets are also evaluated to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art existing methods. Full article

Traditional monopulse angle estimations are mainly based on phase comparison and amplitude comparison methods, which are commonly adopted in narrowband radars. In modern radar systems, wideband radars are becoming more and more important, while the angle estimation for wideband signals is little studied in previous works. As noise in wideband radars has larger bandwidth than narrowband radars, the challenge lies in the accumulation of energy from the high resolution range profile (HRRP) of monopulse. In wideband radars, linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals are frequently utilized. In this paper, we investigate the monopulse angle estimation problem for wideband LFM signals. To accumulate the energy of the received echo signals from different scatterers of a target, we propose utilizing a cross-correlation operation, which can achieve a good performance in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. In the proposed algorithm, the problem of angle estimation is converted to estimating the frequency of the cross-correlation function (CCF). Experimental results demonstrate the similar performance of the proposed algorithm compared with the traditional amplitude comparison method. It means that the proposed method for angle estimation can be adopted. When adopting the proposed method, future radars may only need wideband signals for both tracking and imaging, which can greatly increase the data rate and strengthen the capability of anti-jamming. More importantly, the estimated angle will not become ambiguous under an arbitrary angle, which can significantly extend the estimated angle range in wideband radars. Full article