Time-Range Adaptive Focusing Method Based on APC and Iterative Adaptive Radon-Fourier Transform

In conventional radar signal processing, the cascade of pulse compression (i.e., matched filter) and Radon-Fourier transform (RFT) can extract the estimated scattering coefficient of the target in the range-velocity dimension through long-time coherent integration (i.e., long-time focusing). However, matched filter has problems such as range sidelobes. RFT belongs to a standard time-dimension matched filter, which will cause velocity sidelobes of strong targets. The range-velocity sidelobes caused by matched filter and RFT will mask other weak targets and affect the subsequent signal processing processes such as target detection and tracking. To suppress range-velocity sidelobes and achieve better range-velocity focusing, this paper proposes a time-range adaptive focusing method named APC-IARFT for short, which is based on adaptive pulse compression (APC) and newly proposed iterative adaptive Radon-Fourier transform (IARFT). In the APC-IARFT method, the radar time-range adaptive focusing consists of two steps: range-dimension adaptive focusing and long-time adaptive focusing in the velocity dimension. The APC method can realize range-dimension adaptive focusing and suppress range sidelobes of strong targets. Then, based on the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) formulation, the proposed IARFT method iteratively designs time-dimension adaptive filter of each range-velocity grid according to the received signal processed by APC to suppress velocity sidelobes of strong targets and achieve long-time adaptive focusing. Compared with the conventional cascade of matched filter and RFT, the cascade of matched filter and adaptive Radon-Fourier transform (ARFT), the results show that the proposed time-range adaptive focusing method (i.e., APC-IARFT) is competent for a variety of scenarios.