Moving Target Detection in Stepped Frequency Radars using Compressive Sensing

Stepped frequency radars attract many attentions due to their high range resolution. Conventional processing technique in these radars is based on the IDFT. In detecting moving targets, the IDFT has the problems of range shifting and range spreading, which result in degrading target amplitude, loss of range accuracy and range resolution. To overcome these problems, the velocity compensation method is used. Since the target velocity is unknown, one should compensate the received signal with all possible velocities and choose the one with the highest and sharpest IDFT output. In this paper, by using the compressive sensing based algorithms, a new method for determining the range and the velocity of moving targets in the stepped frequency radar is proposed. The results show that the proposed method does not have any problem with range shifting and range spreading, and has a better performance compared with other methods in literature. Coherent processing concept is also investigated. Simulations show that using the coherent processing, the performance of compressive sensing based radar detectors is considerably improved.