Motion Error Estimation and Coherent Integration for High-Speed Target With Airborne Bistatic Radar

Abstract

With flexibility in maneuverability and remarkable adaptability, airborne bistatic radar system can obtain excellent detection performance for high-speed target by employing coherent integration. However, range migration (RM) and Doppler frequency migration (DFM) could become serious issues due to the relative motion characteristics of airborne platforms and high-speed target. Meanwhile, various unpredictable factors such as atmospheric turbulence and mechanical issues, etc., resulting in additional motion errors, would have further negative impacts on motion state and flight trajectory of airborne platforms. This phenomenon would cause serious consequence on coherent integration and target detection. Thus, we make contributions to tackle these limitations and enhance coherent integration and detection performance. First, we establish signal model with high-speed target in 3-D space for airborne bistatic radar system, along with motion error model which simultaneously includes translational error and rotational error. Next, we articulate range history's mathematical expression and further derive echo signal model. We then propose an improved generalized radon Fourier transform (IGRFT) method. More specifically, the purpose of IGRFT is achieving joint search for the parameters of the target motion and the parameters of motion error, to ensure high precision parameter estimation and high gain integration. However, the computational complexity surges due to the increasing of search dimensionality. To devise computationally feasible methods for practical applications, we split the high-dimensional maximization process into two disjoint problems by sequentially searching motion parameters and then motion error parameters, and this method is named generalized Radon transform (GRT)-IGRFT. Numerical simulations show that the proposed algorithms can correctly estimate parameters and achieve signal integration and target detection. Finally, we present performance analysis of two proposed strategies considering computational complexity, detection performance, and parameter estimation.