Radar signal compression using wavelet transforms

Generally, the echo of radar can be regarded as a combination of useful signal and noise. In this paper, an efficient wavelet-based non-linear signal compression scheme is presented, which takes full advantage of the two-dimensional correlation consisted in the radar signal. The whole process begins with a 4-scale QMF decomposition, then thresholding, quantization, zerotree scan and finished with arithmetic coding. Since radar signal usually is corrupted by a great amount of noise, a particular process of de-noising is added to the compression. For typical radar signal, testing results show that when compressed at a ratio of 200, the signal is still good fairly. Further more, a new criterion fit for quality evaluation of radar signal, i.e. Morphological Fidelity, is proposed.