Reconstruction of Radar Pulse Repetition Pattern via Semantic Coding of Intercepted Pulse Trains

Abstract

The timing structure of multiple successive radar pulses constructs a high-dimensional pattern for intercepted pulse trains, which is called as pulse repetition interval (PRI) pattern. By treating the radar as a machine that uses differently permuted pulses to communicate with surroundings, this pattern acts as the grammatical structure of its language. Compared with the discrete PRI set that is conventionally used for pulse train description, PRI pattern contains richer and more condensed structural information about radar pulse train, which is helpful for pulse deinterleaving and radar recognition. This article introduces the semantic coding theory to reveal and reconstruct PRI pattern from the intercepted radar pulse train. We first define the coding complexity of a pulse train, which is divided into two parts: 1) the complexity of encoding a PRI pattern dictionary with each element consisting of several successive PRIs; and 2) encoding the intercepted pulse train based on this dictionary. The coding complexity is then minimized by optimizing the components in dictionary, and the PRI timing patterns are finally obtained from the dictionary when the minimization is reached. The effectiveness of semantic coding model and PRI pattern reconstruction method is verified in the simulation part.