Knowledge-Aided Ground Moving Target Relocation for Airborne Dual-Channel Wide-Area Radar by Exploiting the Antenna Pattern Information

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of ground moving target relocation (GMTR) for airborne dual-channel wide-area radar systems. The monopulse technique can be utilized to perform GMTR. However, in real conditions, the GMTR performance degrades greatly due to the effect of channel mismatch. To tackle this problem, prior knowledge of the antenna pattern information is fully utilized to improve the GMTR performance, and a knowledge-aided GMTR algorithm (KA-GMTR) for airborne dual-channel wide-area radar is proposed in this paper. First, the GMTR model for the two receiving channels is analyzed. The channel mismatch model is constructed, and its expression is derived. Then, the channel mismatch phase error is well estimated by exploiting the prior antenna pattern information based on the least squares (LS) method. Meanwhile, the knowledge-aided monopulse curve (KA-MPC) is derived to perform the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for potential targets. Finally, KA-GMTR, based on the KA-MPC, is performed to estimate the azimuth offsets and relocate the geometry positions of the potential targets when channel mismatch occurs. Moreover, the target relocation performance is analyzed, and the intrinsic reason that degrades the target relocation accuracy is figured out. The performance assessment based on airborne real-data, also in comparison to the conventional GMTR method, has demonstrated that our proposed KA-GMTR algorithm offers preferable target relocation results under channel mismatch scenarios.

Keywords

• ground moving target relocation (GMTR)
• wide-area radar
• monopulse
• channel mismatch
• phase compensation