A coherent accumulation detection method based on SA-DPT for highly manoeuvring targets

Abstract

The emergence of highly manoeuvrable weak targets has led to serious degradation or even failure of traditional radar detection. In this paper, a coherent accumulation algorithm based on a combination of a scaling algorithm (SA) and a discrete polynomial-phase transform (DPT) is proposed, and the calculation burden and detection performance were evaluated. The algorithm first performs fewer speed parameter compensations based on an SA for the transmitted signal and selects the effective delay range of the target signal. Second, for the extracted echo signal, the DPT algorithm is used to estimate the target speed and acceleration. The proposed algorithm analyses the influence of the time delay range, the compensation speed and the delay unit on the detection performance and provides the improvement degree of the output SNR and the amount of complex multiplication. Finally, the experimental data verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of accumulation gain and parameter estimation. This method is for suboptimal estimation and requires much less computation than joint search methods, but it performs better than cross-correlation methods.