Moving target detection for frequency agility radar by sparse reconstruction

Area of Science:

• Electrical Engineering
• Signal Processing
• Radar Systems

Background:

• Conventional pulse-Doppler radar with fixed carrier frequency is vulnerable to electromagnetic interference.
• Frequency agility radar, varying carrier frequency pulse-to-pulse, enhances resilience against interference.
• Accurate moving target detection and velocity estimation are critical for radar performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel moving target detection (MTD) method for frequency agility radar.
• To estimate target velocity using sparse reconstruction within a coherent processing interval.
• To implement and evaluate the proposed MTD method on hardware.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing sparse reconstruction for target velocity estimation in frequency agility radar.
• Implementing the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm on a Xilinx Virtex-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).
• Conducting experimental evaluations to validate the MTD method's performance.

Main Results:

• The proposed MTD method demonstrates effective moving target detection and velocity estimation for frequency agility radar.
• Hardware implementation on FPGA enables efficient sparse optimization for real-time processing.
• Experimental results confirm the superior performance of the novel MTD approach.

Conclusions:

• The developed MTD method offers a robust solution for frequency agility radar systems.
• Sparse reconstruction provides an effective means for enhancing radar target detection and velocity estimation.
• The FPGA-based implementation facilitates practical application of advanced signal processing techniques in radar.