Moving Target Indication Performance Research Articles

Geosynchronous Spaceborne-Airborne Bistatic Moving Target Indication System: Performance Analysis and Configuration Design

Geosynchronous spaceborne-airborne bistatic synthetic aperture radar (GEO SA-BSAR), consisting of GEO transmitter and airborne receiver, has stable coverage for a long time and benefits moving target detection. However, the performance of GEO SA-BSAR moving target indication (MTI) system varies widely between bistatic configurations. The traditional configuration design for GEO SA-BSAR system only considers the imaging performance, which may cause the poor MTI performance. In this paper, we propose a bistatic configuration design method to jointly optimize the MTI and SAR imaging performance for GEO SA-BSAR MTI system. The relationship between the MTI performance and bistatic configuration parameters is derived analytically and analyzed based on the maximum output signal to clutter and noise ratio (SCNR) criterion. Then, the MTI performance and SAR imaging performance are jointly considered to model the configuration design problem as a multi-objective optimization problem under the constrained condition. Finally, the optimal configuration for GEO SA-BSAR MTI system is given.

Theoretical Performance of Space-Time Adaptive Processing for Ship Detection by High-Frequency Surface Wave Radars

In this paper, we analyze the levels of performance of the (full or reduced versions of) space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithms applied to high-frequency surface wave radars (HFSWRs) for marine target detection to verify whether this family outperforms the usual moving target indication (MTI) algorithms. In fact, STAP algorithms have well-known drawbacks (e.g., large amount of secondary data). The propagation and backscattering of radar signals are included in the covariance matrix calculation. Since the propagation and backscattering have to be derived from physical features of the sea (e.g., sea Doppler) and the atmosphere, we also include the difference induced by the waveform (pulsed radar/chirp) in our study. Moreover, since the inverse covariance matrix is used in the target detection algorithms, matrix conditioning is also inspected for practical implementation reasons. We numerically detail the performance (signal noise clutter ratio and conditioning number of the STAP algorithms) with regards to the MTI performance for several configurations of radar and sea state. These results show that the improvements of signal noise clutter ratio are counterbalanced by a raise of the conditioning number, except in the case of eigencanceler approach. The sea-state parameters have few effects on the performance unlike to radar parameters.

Moving Target Indication Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Existing moving target indication (MTI) methods are limited either by the sufficient and homogeneous secondary data (SD) condition or by the high signal-to-clutter-ratio (SCR) requirement. In practice, such constraints are hard to be satisfied. In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method for the MTI (CNN-MTI) to overcome the limitations of these methods. In the proposed method, the CNN architecture is deliberately designed, and the training data set is greatly augmented to ensure the CNN be deep and well-trained; in addition, the SD only act as the background interference during the augmentation of the training data set. These procedures ensure that the effective features of different classes of moving targets can be extracted, so that good MTI performance can be achieved without the requirement of the sufficient and homogeneous SD or the high SCR condition. Simulation results from the synthetic data and the experimental data demonstrate the validity and the robustness of the CNN-MTI with limited SD support in non-homogeneous and low SCR environment.

펄스 체이싱 스캔 방식을 이용한 바이스태틱 MTI 레이더에서 시스템 불안정 요소들의 영향

본 논문에서는 펄스 체이싱 스캔 방식을 이용한 바이스태틱 MTI 레이더 시스템에서 시스템 불안정 요인들을 식별하고 MTI 개선 성능에 미치는 영향에 대해 고찰하였다. 펄스 체이싱 스캔 방법은 송신 펄스 단위로 제한된 영역을 탐지하는 스캔 방법이며, MTI 필터는 작은 수의 펄스를 이용하여 클러터와 같은 간섭으로부터 표적을 분리할 수 있는 신호 처리 방법이다. 이상적인 MTI 신호 처리 과정은 클러터 자체의 특성에 의해서 클러터 감쇄 및 시스템 개선 성능이 제한되나, 제안된 바이스태틱 레이더 구조에서 MTI 성능은 펄스 체이싱 스캔 동안 수신빔 조향 오차에 의해 영향을 받을 수 있다. 또한, 바이스태틱 수신기에서 시간 동기 오차, COHO의 위상 오차 및 주파수/위상 동기 오차로부터 야기된 다른 시스템 불안정 요소들을 정의하고, 시스템 성능 개선에 미치는 영향들을 분석하였다. In this paper, we have identified the system instability factors in a bistatic radar system using pulse chasing and considered their effects on the bistatic receiver's MTI(Moving Target Indication) improvement performance. The pulse chasing is a scan method that searchs a restricted area on the transmit pulse-to-pulse basis and the MTI filter is a signal processing that separates a target from some kinds of interferences such as clutter using small number of transmit pulses. Ideal MTI processing performance, e.g., clutter attenuation and improvement, has been limited by the property of the clutter itself, however, the MTI performance in a proposed bistatic receiver configuration could be affected by the receiving beam pointing error during pulse chasing scanning. Also, for the bistatic receiver, we have defined other system instability factors, which result from the time synchronization error, COHO's phase error, the frequency/phase synchronization error, and have analyzed their effects on the system performance improvement.

High Resolution Angle-Doppler Imaging for MTI Radar

To reduce the need for training data or for accurate prior knowledge of the clutter statistics in space-time adaptive processing (STAP), we consider high resolution angle-Doppler imaging by processing each range bin of interest independently. Specifically, we use a weighted least-squares-based iterative adaptive approach (IAA) to form angle-Doppler images of both clutter and targets for each range bin of interest. The resulting angle-Doppler images can be used with localized detection approaches for moving target indication (MTI). We show via numerical examples that the robust and nonparametric IAA algorithm can be used to enhance the MTI performance significantly as compared with existing approaches.

Clutter Covariance Matrix Form Effect on Adaptive MTI Performance

The performance of an adaptive moving target indicator (MTI), which employs a Wiener predictor by means of a transversal filter, is discussed, taking into consideration the effect of the form of the clutter covariance matrix on the MTI performance. It is emphasized that the main tap position in the transversal filter is an important factor which provides degrees of freedom in the clutter covariance matrix to improve the MTI performance. Calculation results show that by exploiting these degrees of freedom, excellent performance is feasible, in particular shorter transient response.

An initialization technique for improved MTI performance in phased array radars

A technique is described for employing recursive digital moving-target-indicator (MTI) filters in phased array radars without the undesirable transient effects normally encountered in these filters.