Focus-before-detection Methods for Radar Detection of Near Space High-maneuvering Aircrafts

Abstract

Recently emerging, high maneuvering near space targets have many characteristics that differ from conventional targets, like ultra-high speed, high-maneuverability, ultra-far range, low Radar Cross Section (RCS), plasma sheath, ionosphere layer pollution, and cosmic ray interference. Based on general signal modeling for near space targets of ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne radars, this paper proposes novel focus-before-detection methods with respect to a distributed radar network, multi-dimensions, multiple targets, micro motion, varied model, and non-parametric processing. The proposed FBD based methods can effectively suppress the strong ionosphere layer pollution and active jamming, as well as problems like the scaled effect of echoes, arbitrary motion, aperture fill time, sparse sub-band frequency synthesis, across range cell, across Doppler cell, and across beam width. The proposed Focus-Before-Detection (FBD) based methods can remarkably improve the signal processing performance on target detection, parameter estimation, maneuver tracking, high-resolution imaging, feature extraction, and target recognition. Additionally, they are suitable for both high maneuvering near space targets and conventional targets, and can be applied for both new-generation radars and conventional targets. Therefore, the proposed FBD based methods for high maneuvering near space target detection have both important academic research value and impact a wide variety of applications.