A Method for High-Speed and Maneuvering Range-Spread Target Detection

When detecting range-spread target (RST) with multiple pulses, two phenomena may greatly deteriorate the detection performance. On the one hand, the target scatterers disperse in several range units, which makes the signal to noise ratio (SNR) become lower. On the other hand, high-speed and maneuvering RSTs can easily cause the across-range-unit and across-Doppler-unit effects, which limits the integration gain along slow time. In this paper, a detector is proposed to solve the two problems. The proposed detector first employs generalized Radon-Fourier transform (GRFT) to coherently integrate multiple pulses and then implements noncoherent integration for integrating the energy in different range units. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed detector outperforms the energy integration based Keystone transform detector in both detection and velocity resolution performances, and the proposed detector also achieves better detection performance than GRFT for the RSTs without dominant scatterer.