Hypersonic Target Detection and Velocity Estimation in Coherent Radar System Based on Scaled Radon Fourier Transform

The long-time Coherent Integration (CI) is one of the most effective and important techniques to improve radar detection performance for hypersonic weak targets in coherent radar system. Traditional long-time CI algorithms only consider the Range Walk (RW) rather than the scale effect. Actually, with the increase of target's velocity and the time-bandwidth product of the transmitted signal, the scale effect will appear in the echo signal, which influences the performance of Pulse Compression (PC) and the subsequent CI. In order to address the problem of scale effect during the long-time CI for the hypersonic target, a novel CI algorithm, i.e., SCaled Radon Fourier Transform (SCRFT), is proposed in this paper. The SCRFT can realize intra-pulse and inter-pulse integration for hypersonic target with RW and scale effect. Besides, the proposed algorithm can also estimate target's velocity. Compared to the traditional long-time CI algorithms, SCRFT can achieve better detection and velocity estimation performance. Finally, numerical simulations are carefully designed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.