A novel method for high-speed maneuvering target detection and motion parameters estimation

This paper considers the problems of high-speed maneuvering target detection and motion parameters estimation with complex motions, involving range migration (RM) and Doppler frequency migration (DFM) induced by target’s radial velocity, acceleration and jerk within the coherent integration interval. To address these problems, we propose a novel method based on the third-order keystone transform (TOKT) and first-order discrete polynomial-phase transform (FDPT) in this paper. Firstly, the TOKT is carried out to correct the third-order RM. Secondly, the matched filtering function is constructed to remove the quadratic DFM caused by radial jerk. After that, the FDPT is applied to reduce the target phase order. Then, the TOKT is employed again to eliminate the residual first-order RM related to target’s radial acceleration, and a well-focused peak is acquired after azimuth fast Fourier transform (FFT) as well as range inverse FFT. Finally, based on the position of peak, the motion parameters of maneuvering targets can be estimated efficiently. Compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed method achieves a good balance between the computational complexity and detection ability. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.