UAV detection via long-time coherent integration for passive bistatic radar

Abstract

Detection of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a challenging problem for passive bistatic radar (PBR) because of its low radar cross-section (RCS). Range migration (RM) will occur within one long coherent processing interval, which makes it difficult to increase coherent integration gain and improve radar detection ability. In order to eliminate the RM, a novel coherent integration method based on stretch processing and chirp-z transform (CZT) in the frequency domain is proposed. Firstly, stretch processing is applied to correct RM. Then, CZT is performed to mitigate the residual range offset and achieve coherent integration of the target's energy according to each Doppler cell. The advantage of the proposed method is that it can obtain superior coherent integration and detection performance compared to existing methods. Numerical and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.