The Problem Of Detecting Small Targets Using Microwave Radar PDF Download

The detection and tracking of small slow moving targets by High Frequency Surface Wave radar are limited by the presence of a dominate sea clutter spectrum. The ocean surface behaves as a distributed source in contrast to targets that are point sources. It is shown that by mapping data to eigenspaces, the sea clutter level decreases due to its nondeterministic behaviour while point targets' levels remain unchanged. The high resolution (subspace-based or eigenspace) methods and frequency tracking method for slowly time varying frequencies are evaluated to suppress this sea clutter to enhance detection of weak signals. Experimental results verify the advantage of subspace-based methods over the traditional processing techniques. Conventional subspace methods can be utilized to enhance the detection, but they deteriorate dramatically in the presence of correlated sea clutter. In our thesis some adaptive sea clutter pre-filtering schemes are introduced which improve the threshold and accuracy of subsequent subspace methods. Both simulated and real ship targets are used to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Furthermore, we propose another novel subspace algorithm to estimate the directions of arrival of superimposed cisoidal radar echoes from far-field targets in the radar pulse domain. The improvement provided by this algorithm is based on the use of a state space model that more accurately represents the received Doppler radar array signal prior to spatial processing such as MUSIC. A 2-d (spatial and temporal) pre-filtering matrix is structured and applied to the received array signal, which is finally combined with the high-resolution (MUSIC) method for DOA estimation. Lower resolution threshold and estimation variance are achieved by this algorithm compared to conventional beam-space MUSIC and sensor-space MUSIC. A simplified theoretical resolution threshold is derived, and both the theory and simulations verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Results from an experiment using a simulated target superimposed on real HF radar sea clutter also confirm the algorithm.