Radar processor system and method

Abstract

An adaptive radar processing system includes an antenna array for transmitting a radar signal and for receiving a return radar signal, and a signal processor programmed with an enhanced FRACTA algorithm (FRACTA.E). The basic FRACTA algorithm is enhanced to FRACTA.E with (any or all of) five enhancements, versions 1-5. Version 1 is a stopping criterion, for censoring samples, that is adaptive to a radar return data set. The inclusion of a stopping criterion improves the computational speed of FRACTA.E thereby improving its efficiency. Version 2 uses global censoring. Version 3 uses fast reiterative censoring. Version 4 uses segmenting of data vectors for AMF application. Version 5 uses Knowledge-aided covariance estimation (KACE) to reduce the required sample support that may be necessary in non-homogeneous environments, providing substantially the same level of detection performance with considerably less training data.

Description

[0001] The present application claims the benefit of the priority filing date of provisional patent application Ser. No. 60 / 499,373, filed Sep. 3, 2003, incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] This invention relates to a processing method and system for radar applications. More particularly, the invention relates to adaptive radar processing. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] Radar systems such as those used for airborne applications typically have to contend with the presence of non-homogeneous clutter, jamming, and dense target clusters. An approach that has proved successful in minimizing the masking effect of undesirable false signals on a target return signal is adaptive matched filtering for signal processing. [0004] Adaptive signal processing systems have many applications including radar reception, cellular telephones, communications systems, and biomedical imaging. Adaptive signal processing systems utilize adaptive filtering to differentiate between...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0020] According to the invention, an adaptive radar processing system includes an antenna array for transmitting a radar signal and for receiving a return radar signal, and a signal processor programmed with an enhanced FRACTA algorithm (FRACTA.E). The basic FRACTA algorithm is enhanced with any or all of five enhancements (FRACTA.E versions 1-5). Version 1 is a stopping criterion, for censoring samples, that is adaptive to a radar return data set. The inclusion of a stopping criterion improves the computational speed of FRACTA.E, improving its performance and efficiency. Version 2 uses global censoring. Version 3 uses fast reiterative censoring. Version 4 uses segmenting of data vectors for AMF. Version 5 uses Knowledge-aided covariance estimation (KACE) to reduce the required sample support that may be necessary in non-homogeneous environments, providing substantially the same level of detection performance with considerably less training data.

[0022] Version 1, for example, uses a stopping criterion. The inclusion of a stopping criterion improves the computational speed of FRACTA.E thereby improving its efficiency. The stopping criterion is denoted as the Censoring Stopping Rule (CSR).

[0023] Further modifications that increase the utility and / or the performance of the adaptive radar processing system with FRACTA.E include the application of Global Censoring (GC) (version 2) or the application of Fast Reiterative Censoring (FRC) (version 3). Adaptive processing at less than full resolution by segmenting the data vectors is another enhancement to FRACTA (version 4). This is henceforth denoted as Data Vector Segmentation (DVS).

[0024] An additional modification improving the performance of the system and method of the invention is supplementing FRACTA with Knowledge-aided Covariance Estimation (KACE) (version 5), which reduces the required sample support that may be necessary in non-homogeneous environments. FRACTA.E (version 5) can then achieve substantially the same level of detection performance with considerably less training data.

Problems solved by technology

Radar systems such as those used for airborne applications typically have to contend with the presence of non-homogeneous clutter, jamming, and dense target clusters.

In these systems, desired signal detection and estimation is hindered by noise and interference.

However, real-world weight training data may be contaminated by undesirable impulse noise outliers, resulting in a non-Gaussian distribution of real and imaginary components.

If, however, the weight training data contains non-Gaussian noise outliers, the convergence MOE of the system increases to require an unworkably large number of weight training data samples.

The performance degradation of the SMI algorithm in the presence of non-Gaussian distributions (outliers) can be attributed to the highly sensitive nature of input noise covariance matrix estimates to even small amounts of impulsive non-Gaussian noise that may be corrupting the dominant Gaussian noise distribution.

Thus, for contaminated weight training data, convergence rate may slow significantly with conventional systems.

Fast convergence rates are important for several practical reasons including limited amounts of weight training data due to non-stationary interference and computational complexity involved in generating adaptive weights.

In other words, the time which elapses while a conventional system is acquiring weight training data and generating adaptive weights may exceed the stationary component of a given non-stationary noise environment, and an adaptive weight thus generated has become obsolete prior to completion of its computation.

Conventional signal processors assume that the weight training data has a Gaussian distribution, and therefore they do not perform as well as theory would predict when operating with real world data.

However, they still have convergence MOE's that are degraded by outliers.

Due to the lack of knowledge of an external environment, adaptive techniques require a certain amount of data to estimate the MN×MN input covariance matrix effectively.

However, the presence of outliers in the training data can skew the covariance matrix estimate such that a true target in the primary range cell is suppressed.

This problem is closely related to the existence of land-sea clutter interfaces, which cause significant degradation in airborne radar adaptive processing.

The presence of the desired target returns in the training data can severely degrade the adaptive match filter's performance, because the training data is used to estimate a weighting vector which is in the null space of the signal and interference sources that are in the training data.

Hence, if a signal that has the desired signal's steering vector is in the training data, the adaptive weight vector may null the desired signal.

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