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Traditional radar systems use fixed patterns and constant electromagnetic wave transmission to illuminate targets, but they often do not effectively use prior information about targets and consume significant radar resources. Cognitive radar has emerged as a way to improve resource efficiency and address these shortcomings. A joint waveform design and resource allocation strategy for cognitive radar that incorporates target situational awareness is proposed. This method integrates the interacting multiple model algorithm and the Unscented Kalman Particle Filter to achieve target situation awareness as prior knowledge. By combining the target attitude and the frequency response function of the target radar cross section at different time points in the prior knowledge, a joint beam control and power allocation strategy is formulated and transformed into an optimization problem. In addition, a cognitive pulse‐to‐pulse frequency agile waveform design method is proposed to support multiple target tracking under complex motion models. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in obtaining accurate target situation information, achieving beam control, and optimizing power allocation. The designed waveforms can enhance radar target detection performance and improve low probability of intercept characteristics by adjusting the pulse repetition interval. This method has significant technical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar High‐Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) has great potential for target recognition because it can provide target structural information. Existing work commonly applies deep learning to extract deep features from HRRPs and achieve impressive recognition performance. However, most approaches are unable to distinguish between the target and non‐target regions in the feature extraction process and do not fully consider the impact of background noise, which is harmful to recognition, especially at low signal‐to‐noise ratios (SNR). To tackle these problems, the authors propose a radar HRRP target recognition framework termed Adaptive Soft Threshold Transformer (ASTT), which is composed of a patch embedding (PE) layer, ASTT blocks, and Discrete Wavelet Patch Merging (DWPM) layers. Given the limited semantic information of individual range cells, the PE layer integrates nearby isolated range cells into semantically explicit target structure patches. Thanks to its convolutional layer and attention mechanism, the ASTT blocks assign a weight to each patch to locate the target areas in the HRRP while capturing local features and constructing sequence correlations. Moreover, the ASTT block efficiently filters noise features in combination with a soft threshold function to further enhance the recognition performance at low SNR, where the threshold is adaptively determined. Utilising the reversibility of the discrete wavelet transform, the DWPM layer efficiently eliminates the loss of valuable information during the pooling process. Experiments based on simulated and measured datasets show that the proposed method has excellent target recognition performance, noise robustness, and small‐scale range shift robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, a novel algorithm is proposed to design symbol‐level waveform for dual‐functional radar‐communication (DFRC) systems with low range sidelobe. Different from current schemes design waveform at the block level, a phase response constraint is introduced at the symbol level to provide an additional degree of freedom to decrease the range sidelobe in the pulse compression procedure, which is highly desired in radar systems. In particular, the phase response at the target direction is constrained to be similar to the given reference phase, and the matching error between the designed beampattern and the desired one is minimized subject to the constant modulus constraint. Furthermore, to guarantee the quality of service for communication, constructive interference is exploited at the symbol level for each communication user. An alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm is also proposed to solve the resulting nonconvex optimization problem with tractable subproblems solved sufficiently by the manifold optimization and standard quadratic problem. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enhance the capability of identifying unknown emitters in open spaces, an open‐multiscale attention kernel (MSAK)‐convolutional neural network‐long short‐term memory (CNN‐LSTM) structure is proposed. To this end, first, a MSAK module and CNN‐LSTM structure are introduced, and then, the depth and complexity of the feature extraction network are improved to enhance its representation capability. To classify unknown emitters accurately, the MSAK‐CNN‐LSTM model is improved to obtain an open‐MSAK‐CNN‐LSTM model with open‐set recognition capability. Additionally, the two preprocessing procedures are summarised, and their strengths and weaknesses are compared. Experimental results show that the proposed open‐MSAK‐CNN‐LSTM model achieves satisfactory accuracy in identifying unknown emitters in open space. In addition, it has significant advantages in low signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forward‐looking radar imaging is a top priority due to a variety of applications. An airborne forward‐looking radar imaging approach via a modified propagator method (MPM) based on the planar phased array is proposed. It can obtain a better focusing effect without range migration correction. Through the MPM algorithm, the azimuth resolution can be enhanced greatly. Compared with the conventional synthetic aperture radar imaging algorithm, the left‐right ambiguity process can be avoided by generating two‐dimensional spatial spectra. Furthermore, the imaging results of different numbers of elements are given to provide an assessment of the imaging performance. Additionally, the authors proposed to apply the scanning planar phased array configuration to airborne forward‐looking two‐dimensional imaging for the first time. The validity of the method is proven by experiments. The image is more focused. Furthermore, the results of the experiments verify that the proposed method is fit for high‐speed situation and aircraft height variation condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar systems are a topic of great interest, especially due to their extensive range of applications and ability to operate in all weather conditions. Modern radars have high requirements such as its resolution, accuracy and robustness, depending on the application. Noise Radar Technology (NRT) has the upper hand when compared to conventional radar technology in several characteristics. Its robustness to jamming, low Mutual Interference and low probability of intercept are good examples of these advantages. However, its signal processing is more complex than that associated to a conventional radar. Artificial Intelligence (AI)‐based signal processing is getting increasing attention from the research community. However, there is yet not much research on these methods for noise radar signal processing. The aim of the authors is to provide general information regarding the research performed on radar systems using AI and draw conclusions about the future of AI in noise radar. The authors introduce the use of AI‐based algorithms for NRT and provide results for its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utilisation of continuous random waveforms for radar, that is, noise radar, has been extensively studied as a candidate for low probability of intercept operation. However, compared with the more traditional pulse‐Doppler radar, noise radar systems are significantly more complicated to implement, which is likely why few systems exist. If noise radar systems are to see the light of day, system design, implementation, limitations etc., must be investigated. Therefore, the authors examine and detail the implementation of a real‐time noise radar system on a field programmable gate array. The system is capable of operating with 100% duty cycle, 200 MHz bandwidth, and 268 ms integration time while processing a range of about 8.5 km. Additionally, the system can perform real‐time moving target compensation to reduce cell migration. System performance is primarily limited by the memory bandwidth of the off‐chip dynamic random access memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In electronic warfare, radar signal deinterleaving is a critical task. While many researchers have applied deep learning and utilised known radar classes to construct interleaved pulse sequences training sets for deinterleaving models, these models face challenges in distinguishing between known and unknown radar classes in open‐set scenarios. To address this challenge, the authors propose a novel model, the Reconstruction Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (RBi‐RNN). RBi‐RNN utilises input reconstruction and employs a joint training strategy incorporating cross‐entropy loss, reconstruction loss, and centre loss. These strategies aim to maximise inter‐class latent representation distances while minimising intra‐class disparities. By incorporating an open‐set recognition method based on extreme value theory, RBi‐RNN adapts to open‐set scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of RBi‐RNN over conventional models in both closed‐set and open‐set scenarios. In open‐set scenarios, it successfully discriminates between known and unknown radar signals within interleaved pulse sequences, deinterleaving known radar classes with high stability. The authors lay the foundation for future unsupervised deinterleaving methods designed specifically for unknown radar pulses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two‐dimensional direction‐of‐arrival (DoA) estimation in azimuth and elevation via radar systems equipped with uniform rectangular arrays (URAs) will play an important role in various application areas—most distinctively in future urban air mobility settings with unmanned aerial vehicles. A key factor is the fast and reliable provision of target detections in terms of range and DoA for safe autonomous operation of the vehicle using on‐board antenna arrays with compact installation size. The authors present a technique for improving the performance of DoA estimation using compressive sensing in conjunction with multiple‐input multiple‐output arrays with electronically steered beams in the transmit direction. The simulation study investigates the impact of different design considerations on radar signal processing performance. An optimisation of a radar system using electronic beamsteering in the transmit domain is presented numerically. Based on the architecture of the URAs used, performance and detection accuracy can be improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The joint transmit and receive beamforming algorithm has been envisioned to optimise the target's signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio by co‐designing the transmit and receive beamforming vectors simultaneously. However, the traditional design concepts for this algorithm only consider the monostatic radar system, which may not work as well for the multistatic radar system. The authors present a novel transmit and receive beamforming algorithm for the multistatic radar system that includes a common transmitter and multiple receivers. The transmit beamforming vector can directly influence the output signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio of each radar subsystem. To ensure the balanced performance of the subsystems, the authors propose a weighted sum of the signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio optimisation problem to co‐design the transmit and receive beamforming. The proposed problem is non‐convex, and the authors construct an iterative algorithm to solve it using semi‐definite relaxation and slack‐variable replacement techniques. By using pre‐determined weights, the output performance of each radar subsystem can be effectively regulated. The simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can ensure better output signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio for the entire multistatic radar system than the conventional joint transmit and receive beamforming algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detection of space objects is a key component of space situational awareness, which could help prevent and minimise space collisions. While there have been lots of radar systems designed to detect space objects, few of them have dealt with long baseline distributed bistatic pairs. The authors focus on the feasibility of long baseline bistatic radars, which can be extended for the multistatic case; and the performance of the multistatic system for a target at different altitudes assuming one transmitter over three different scenarios: a cluster of receivers, receivers spread throughout the world and the combination of the two previous cases. To analyse the performance the multiple‐input‐multiple‐output (MIMO) ambiguity function (AF) will be employed. The results of the MIMO AF show how the fusion of different bistatic pairs improves the detection capabilities. Moreover, when the different radar measurements are coherently summed in the MIMO AF, the uncertainty on the location of the target is reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a guest editorial that discusses advancements and future trends in noise radar technology. Noise radar technology uses random and non-periodic radar signals to eliminate ambiguities present in other radars. The article explores the practical aspects of noise radar technology, such as evaluating the degree of randomness in transmission and the computational load of signal processing. It also covers topics like electronic warfare, anti-intercept features, and the potential applications of artificial intelligence in noise radar technology. The article includes specific papers on implementation aspects, waveform selection, anti-intercept features, and artificial intelligence applications in noise radar technology. The authors hope that this special issue provides valuable insights into the advancements and future trends of noise radar technology. [Extracted from the article]

With the development of electronic warfare, anti‐jamming measure becomes more and more complex. There have been certain research results on jamming strategies, but only a few research materials on anti‐jamming strategies. It is difficult to simulate the real jamming environment, and there is no appropriate anti‐jamming decision‐making model for research. Cognitive radar can perceive the environment and receive feedback, which provides the possibility to solve the problem of anti‐jamming decision‐making. This article regards the anti‐jamming measure as a kind of interaction behaviour and establishes the cognitive radar antagonistic environment model and uses the reinforcement learning algorithm to solve the problem of anti‐jamming decision‐making. Finally, this article verifies the feasibility of applying reinforcement learning theory on making anti‐jamming decision in the radar antagonistic environment model. The performance of different reinforcement learning algorithms is compared, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on previous radar‐based human activity recognition (HAR), we expand the micro‐Doppler signature to 6 domains and exploit each domain with a set of handcrafted features derived from the literature and our patents. An adaptive thresholding method to isolate the region of interest is employed, which is then applied in other domains. To reduce the computational burden and accelerate the convergence to an optimal solution for classification accuracy, a holistic approach to HAR optimisation is proposed using a surrogate model‐assisted differential evolutionary algorithm (SADEA‐I) to jointly optimise signal processing, adaptive thresholding and classification parameters for HAR. Two distinct classification models are evaluated with holistic optimisation: SADEA‐I with support vector machine classifiers (SVM) and SADEA‐I with AlexNet. They achieve an accuracy of 89.41% and 93.54%, respectively. This is an improvement of ∼11.3% for SVM and ∼2.7% for AlexNet when compared to the performance without SADEA‐I. The effectiveness of our holistic approach is validated using the University of Glasgow human radar signatures dataset. This proof of concept is significant for dimensionality reduction and computational efficiency when facing a multiplication of radar representation domains/feature spaces and transmitting/receiving channels that could be individually tuned in modern radar systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a guest editorial from the journal IET Radar, Sonar & Navigation. It discusses the advances in AI-assisted radar sensing applications and the challenges that hinder its adoption in this field. The special issue of the journal features nine papers that address these challenges and offer innovative ideas and experimental results. The papers cover a range of topics, including health monitoring, human activity recognition, voice identification, elderly care health monitoring, track-to-track association, signal pre-processing, traffic congestion alleviation, and target recognition. The authors express their gratitude to the contributors and reviewers and believe that the research presented will inspire further exploration and innovation in this field. [Extracted from the article]

This article is a guest editorial for the IET Radar, Sonar & Navigation journal, focusing on selected papers from the RADAR 2022 conference held in Edinburgh, UK. The conference provided an opportunity for radar specialists from 22 countries to explore the latest developments in radar systems. Key topics discussed at the conference included new radar trends, target detection (with a focus on drones), low-frequency radar, and cognitive radar. The special issue contains 17 papers based on extended work presented at the conference, covering topics such as multistatic radar, passive radar, target signatures, and advanced radar processing techniques. The authors hope that this special issue will serve as a valuable resource for further research in the field. [Extracted from the article]

The paper focuses on the results of experimental research on the possibility of passive space object detection using a single radio telescope from the European Low‐Frequency Array (LOFAR) network of astronomical radio telescopes. Commercial digital television (DVB‐T) transmitters were used as illuminators of opportunity in this radar system. In the conducted experiments, one LOFAR radio telescope served both as a surveillance receiver and reference receiver in a passive radar system. The greater part of the LOFAR telescope array was used to observe a space object, while a small part of the array was directed towards the illuminator of opportunity to record the reference signal. One of the most important problems to overcome with utilising the LOFAR radio telescope in such a solution was the effective suppression of the direct‐path component in a surveillance signal coming from the illuminator of opportunity, which was relatively close to the LOFAR radio telescope. The results regarding the passive detection of the International Space Station, included in the paper, confirm the possibility of observing the space object flying in Low‐Earth Orbit using the LOFAR telescope or another receiving system with a similar antenna array. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a simple non‐adaptive approach for the suppression of direct signal and clutter contributions in a passive radar system based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing transmissions, exploiting the properties of a reciprocal filter (RF). The use of a RF allows to circumvent the limits posed by the waveform ambiguity function, producing a data‐independent time‐invariant response to a stationary point‐like target echo at the output of the range compression stage. This feature enables simple clutter cancellation strategies, based on the subtraction of delayed portions of the surveillance signal, according to the conventional moving target indication methodologies. The proposed processing scheme consists of a range compression stage based on a RF, followed by a Single Canceller. Its performance is investigated against a simulated and an experimental data set, for the case of a digital video broadcasting‐terrestial‐based passive radar scenario, and it is compared to an alternative scheme based on a conventional matched filter and adaptive cancellation techniques. The proposed approach is shown to yield a perfect cancellation of the clutter returns from a stationary scene under ideal conditions. Moreover, it proves to be robust to real‐world conditions, despite its considerably limited computational load compared to adaptive clutter cancellation techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although radar sensors have been known for their robustness in challenging environmental conditions, they face difficulties in distinguishing between upper structure (US), such as road signs, traffic lights, overpasses, and pedestrian bridges, and forward vehicle (FV). This misclassification can lead to false alarms and unwanted braking events. In this paper, the authors propose a method distinguishing between US and FV at different distances based on change in radar cross section (RCS). The study collects real‐world RCS data from various objects identified as US and FV during road driving scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active deception jamming recognition has gained significant attention as a crucial aspect of modern electronic warfare, and a large quantity of jamming recognition methods based on either artificial or deep learning methods have been proposed to date. In actual complex battlefields, the abundant deceptive jamming signals are extremely difficult to obtain and the deceptive jamming signals leveraged by the adversarial jammers are often significantly influenced by noise. To address these challenges a Siamese squeeze wavelet attention network (SSWAN) for radar active deception jamming recognition method is proposed. By constructing a wavelet attention module (WAM), the fine‐grained time‐frequency texture features of echo and jamming signals are preferably extracted even under prohibitively strong noise scenarios. Specifically, the Siamese structure is employed as the main backbone network to measure the similarity between jamming signals and make full use of the training samples; besides, the squeeze learning module is embedded to maintain lightweight and prevent overfitting. Experimental results demonstrate that at a jamming‐to‐noise ratio (JNR) of −8 dB, the proposed method achieves recognition accuracies above 96.3% for 6‐class and multi‐class combinational active deceptive jamming types. Overall, compared to mainstream deep networks, the proposed method exhibits superior advantages in lower JNR ratio and small samples of actual battlefield scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interrupted sampling repeater jamming can produce numerous active false targets with high fidelity, which is a significant challenge for coherent pulse radar. This poses a threat to the effectiveness of anti‐jamming technology, such as time‐frequency analysis and frequency agility for conventional constant pulse repetition interval (PRI) radar, which will render the radar inoperable to detect and track the actual target. A random PRI and intra‐pulse frequency agile radar waveform with low interception properties is proposed, which can effectively restrict the acquisition of radar waveform parameters by the jammer, destroy the coherence of jamming signals, and capture the range‐dimensional centroid feature of the echo. Accordingly, a jamming identification method based on the scale constrained Gaussian mixture model and an entity radar target energe recovery algorithm based on the neighbourhood weighted maximum entropy are proposed for target detection. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gaussian noise model and estimators based on least squares (LS) are widely used in target localisation with distributed multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) radar because of their computational efficiency. However, the accuracy of existing LS‐based target localisation algorithms deteriorates sharply in the presence of outliers in the measurements. Thus, a robust solution is developed based on the lp ${l}_{p}$‐norm minimisation criterion and iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) for locating a moving target with impulse noise using the angle of arrival (AOA), time delay (TD), and Doppler shift (DS) measurements. First, the AOA, TD, and DS measurement noise models are developed based on the α‐stable distribution. Then, the localisation problem is transformed into an lp ${l}_{p}$‐norm minimisation problem by linearising the AOA, TD, and DS measurement equations. Finally, the lp ${l}_{p}$‐norm minimisation problem is solved using an IRLS method to obtain the target position and estimate the velocity. Moreover, the optimum of the norm order (p) and the Cramér–Rao lower bound for the target position and velocity estimation are derived under α‐stable distributed measurement noise. The simulation results demonstrate that the developed algorithm offers higher accurascy and robustness than the existing ones in the presence of measurement outliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional signal deinterleaving methods depend on preset parameters, use complicated steps and have limitations in handling complex electromagnetic environments where signals overlap in the space, time and frequency domains. This paper presents a novel approach using a deep segmentation network for radar signal deinterleaving. The pulse descriptor word data is transformed into a dot matrix image, which is then processed by a Cascade‐Recurrent Loop Network (CRLN) for segmentation. The CRLN consists of a Type Segmentation Network, an Amount Decision Network and a Recurrent Individual Segmentation Network. By recursively segmenting each target and determining the number of sources, the CRLN overcomes the challenges posed by the discontinuity and high overlap of individuals in the dot matrix image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing traditional deinterleaving methods, achieving high accuracy, low omission rate and effectively mitigates the increasing batch problem in complex scenarios. The experiments conducted on a randomly generated dataset yielded impressive results: over 90% accuracy when dealing with pulses from 15 radars of different types, over 96% accuracy when deinterleaving pulses from 4 radar individuals of a same type and over 90% accuracy when handling 5 radars of different types with 10% pulse loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to enhance the resource utilisation of the netted radar system, a receiving resource allocation (RRA) strategy for target localisation is developed in this article. Receiving resource refers to the receiving node and the processing approach adopted. The aim of the proposed RAA strategy is to select the receiver node and corresponding processing approach to minimise the resource cost while satisfying the desired target localisation accuracies. The resource cost includes the implementation cost of the processing approaches and the distance cost of data transmission. The Cramer‐Rao bound (CRB) incorporating the above controllable parameters is derived and used as the target localisation performance metric in the netted radar system. Whereafter, the RRA problem is modelled as a non‐convex constrained optimisation problem with the discrete variables. A scheme based on the modified depth‐first search is proposed to solve this problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce resource consumption under the desired target localisation performance constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, the Time Difference of Arrival location technology in distributed high‐frequency surface wave radar has attracted wide attention due to its simple system, low cost, and higher positioning accuracy. Based on the time difference direction‐finding algorithm, this article presents new mathematical expressions of geometric dilution of precision in the Time Difference of Arrival positioning systems. The time difference direction‐finding reveals that the angle measurements are accurate for any length of baseline. Then the differences in geometric dilution of precision between the proposed algorithm and traditional method are analysed. Time difference direction‐finding algorithm can improve positioning accuracy without additional target information. Compared with the traditional method, the proposed algorithm can improve the positioning accuracy of partial observation areas under the same radar measurement system. The simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hand gesture recognition based on micro‐Doppler (MD) radar has garnered considerable attention from researchers as a potential method for human–computer interaction (HCI). However, two significant challenges, that is, obvious differences in MD map size and lots of redundant information contained in the MD maps, are encountered. Here, a multi‐scale graph‐based hand gesture recognition framework is proposed. First, a MD graph representation method is developed, which is adapted to arbitrary‐sized frames and enables to map the key features in a sparse manner. Then, the multi‐scale information from MD graph is fully extracted for hand gesture recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves a state‐of‐the‐art accuracy of 96.73% on the four‐class radar hand gesture dataset, while reducing up to 99% of the redundant information in the MD maps. This framework requires only a little amount of memory storage with good hand gesture recognition capability, demonstrating its high potential in the HCI field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accuracy of radar emitter signal sorting nowadays deteriorates due to the high flexibility and complexity of modern radar pulse streams and the density of crowded electromagnetic environment. In modern radar signal sorting based on pulse repetition interval, conventional methods usually fail to achieve acceptable accuracy and lack stable performance for two main reasons: (1) Conventional methods require a large number of pulses in the stream, which is not practical in many applications. (2) These methods are sensitive to pulse loss and random noise pulses. These two reasons are the main problem that is addressed in this paper. Our proposed model is a machine learning architecture called Unified Residual Recurrent Neural Network (URRNN). In this architecture, residual neural network and recurrent neural network are combined and modified to alleviate the forementioned shortcomings of traditional approaches and enhance the model performance in both classification and deinterleaving tasks. This aim is achieved due to the fact that URRNN extracts both spatial and temporal features, which means more information about processed stream that is exploited to enhance model performance. Three different architectural combinations of URRNN, which show high accuracy and reasonable processing time, are built and trained. The structural and functional description are provided for each architecture. Simulation demonstrates high accuracy and reliable performance of the proposed methods in different circumstances. The results are compared with the results obtained by other conventional machine learning techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been significant research focused on identifying jamming signals using neural networks to improve identification accuracy. However, traditional networks require large‐scale datasets for training, which is challenging in small sample scenarios such as actual battlefield jamming signal data. Additionally, the large number of parameters in traditional models presents deployment challenges for devices. To address these issues, this study proposes a lightweight neural network model called MobileViT_CA, an improved version of MobileViT, for jamming recognition in small sample scenarios. MobileViT_CA adopts a coordinate attention mechanism suitable for lightweight networks, which further improves the classification performance of the network. The model converts one‐dimensional jamming signals into two‐dimensional time‐frequency distribution images through time‐frequency analysis and then uses the network for recognition. Compared with traditional neural network models, MobileViT_CA significantly reduces the network parameter volume while maintaining high recognition accuracy, accelerating network inference speed, and reducing hardware requirements. Experimental results show that MobileViT_CA performs well in small sample data. The model's fast learning ability has also been verified by using transfer learning, and the use of Grad‐CAM and t‐SNE to analyse MobileViT_CA demonstrates its advantages in feature recognition and extraction. Overall, this approach has the potential to significantly improve the reliability and effectiveness of jamming recognition systems in battlefield scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors show improved radar range and velocity resolution is achieved using fast orthogonal search in place of the standard fast Fourier transform. The method reliably detects targets that are close either in range or in velocity, which is relevant today given recent advances in target swarms. The method presented also allows radars to detect slower targets closer to the zero‐Doppler region, like uncrewed aerial systems (drones) moving slowly to escape detection. The authors also show a novel method for estimating the velocity spectrum of a pulse‐Doppler radar using the in‐phase and quadrature samples directly by presenting unique terms to the fast orthogonal search. This eliminates the need to convert into complex samples for processing. The authors compared the performance of the new fast orthogonal search method against the fast Fourier transform using both simulated pulse‐Doppler radar data and real frequency‐modulated continuous wave radar data taken in an anechoic chamber. The simulated pulse‐Doppler scenarios included targets closely spaced in velocity and targets near the zero‐Doppler null, all at a variety of signal‐to‐interference ratios. In all cases, the fast orthogonal search method was shown capable of detecting both the closely‐spaced and near‐zero‐Doppler targets a greater percentage of time compared to the fast Fourier transform. Furthermore, when the methods were compared using real frequency‐modulated continuous wave radar data, the stationary targets were resolved at 0.4 m using the fast orthogonal search as compared to 0.6 m for the fast Fourier transform. Thus, this new method is capable of greater radar range and velocity resolution than the fast Fourier transform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is a new method technique that supports reliable information transmission in a strong Doppler environment. Aiming at the radar target parameter estimation problem of integration of radar and communication (IRC) based on OTFS, this paper proposes a two‐step radar target parameter estimation algorithm combining maximum likelihood (ML) estimation and gradient descent (GD) principle. Firstly, the echo signal of the OTFS integrated signal is constructed and based on this, the ML estimation model is constructed, and the alternating projection (AP) algorithm is employed to make a rough estimation of the target parameters. Then the rough estimation results of the AP‐ML algorithm are employed as the initial value of the GD algorithm for the fine parameter estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better target parameter estimation performance and resolution while reducing the computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever‐expanding horizon of radar applications demands solutions with high‐end radar functionalities and technologies and is often limited by the available radar equipment, cost and time. A practical method to tackle the situation is to rely on the modelling and simulation of radar systems based on the user requirements. The comprehensive system‐level modelling of a pulsed Doppler radar in MATLAB/Simulink consisting of all the fundamental blocks in the transmit chain, the environment, the receive chain, and the data processing chain is presented in this article. The first half of the article discusses the high‐fidelity simulation of each building block in the radar model. In the second half of the article, the range‐Doppler plot generated from the high‐fidelity radar model is compared and validated using the range‐Doppler plot from a real radar trial. The radar phase noise plays a crucial role in the detection of slowly moving, low radar cross‐section targets in the presence of strong clutter. The article also briefly discusses the effects of radar oscillator phase noise in the range‐Doppler plot. The validated, fully flexible radar model has the advantage of supporting the addition of further building blocks and optimising the parameters based on user requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belligerent sides of current military conflicts are first and foremost counting on intelligence, air supremacy, and electromagnetic spectrum dominance. Actual concepts of conducting military operations can be characterised by the massive employment of air defence systems, radars, and electronic warfare systems. An approach is aimed to strengthen air‐defence potential by improving the resilience of pulse radar against electronic warfare threats, such as an electronic attack. To cope with the above‐mentioned situation, a radar intrapulse modulation was designed, where a combination of Costas codes and Walsh‐Hadamard codes is applied. Using a particular waveform together with the proposed model for radar signal processing results in increased resilience against an electronic attack, especially against repeater jamming methods. Furthermore, it is also possible to process radar echoes at low levels of Signal‐to‐Noise Ratio (SNR), which enhances radar electronic counter–countermeasure capability. The main scientific contribution of the paper is in the unique design of the Pulse Compression Filter for Combined Intrapulse Modulation (PCF‐CIM) and in its modelling. Based on the statistical evaluation of results, using the proposed radar waveform together with PCF‐CIM, it is possible to detect radar signals with combined intrapulse modulation in the case of SNR ≥ −14 dB with TPR ≥0.9999 and FPR ≤10−6, where SNR stands for Signal‐to‐Noise Ratio, TPR stands for True Positive Rate, and FPR stands for False Positive Rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human identification and activity recognition (HIAR) is crucial for many applications, such as surveillance, smart homes, and assisted living. As a sensing modality, radar has many unique characteristics including privacy protection, and contactless sensing. Single classification systems have shown to be accurate, but for long‐term solutions both human identification (ID) and human activity recognition (HAR) will need to be integrated in one system where it can be utilised simultaneously. In this article, a novel radar‐based human tracking system is presented where three classifiers are utilised to identify the subject and his/her behaviour. For any kind of motion, the system tracks the subject and detect the type of his/her motion. Based on the detected type of motion, the three classifiers are utilised for identification and activity recognition. The classifiers are built utilising deep transfer learning where three radar datasets are established to train and validate each of the deep networks. To recognise six activities and 10 human subjects, the three classifiers, namely, HAR, Gait ID, and Heart sound ID, achieve superior performance compared to the best reported results in literature with classification accuracies of 97.6%, 100%, and 41.8% respectively. Three successful examples are presented to demonstrate the introduced concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The range and azimuth information of a target can be obtained after coherent pulse accumulation of the traditional multiframe stepped‐frequency (SF) synthesis wideband echo and spectrum analysis, and high‐resolution two‐dimensional imaging of the target can be achieved. However, the accumulation of a certain number of pulses requires a long beam dwell time, which cannot meet real‐time imaging requirements for high‐speed radar moving platforms. To solve the above problems, a scanning imaging mode is proposed by combining forward‐looking imaging and scanning imaging, and a target echo signal model with the structure of scanning stepped‐frequency is constructed. The SF pulses are grouped and transmitted according to the scanning order, and the echo pulses are sorted and reorganised. After the timing compensation and range Doppler coupling compensation are completed, the target is located and projected. The proposed imaging mode can achieve high‐resolution scanning forward‐looking imaging and can basically attain an azimuth resolution of approximately 0.1° within the forward‐looking scanning range. This imaging mode has higher real‐time performance and a larger target imaging range than the traditional methods. Moreover, the simulation results showed good performance via the scanning imaging method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to improve the detection probability of weak targets, tracking radar using sum and difference beams often adopt the method of long‐time coherent integration. However, the multidimensional migration of time‐varying targets will lead to the decline of parameter estimation accuracy. To solve this problem, this article proposes a refined angle estimation method for time‐varying targets with the traditional sum and difference beam echo model, this method compensates and searches the angle parameters of the targets based on subarray rotation invariant and focus process. In addition, this article also studies the masking problem of highly dynamic proximity group targets detection, and proposes an adaptive weighted LMS‐CLEAN based on Least Mean Square criterion, which effectively reduces the influence of masking effect on the parameter estimation accuracy of weak targets. Firstly, the proposed algorithm performs angle search and phase compensation on the pulse compression echo of sum and difference channels based on subarray rotation invariant. Secondly, focus the search matrix, reconstruct the strong target echo, and stripe it from both channels by adaptive weighting. Lastly, repeat the above steps until parameters of all targets are achieved precisely. The proposed two algorithms maintain a very low computational effort while effectively reducing the parameter estimation error, and are highly promising for engineering applications. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, this article also provides some numerical experiments to compares with two existing algorithms in error performance, anti‐noise performance, and computational complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar enables a convenient, contactless way for gait analysis in daily scenarios, such as in‐home health monitoring. However, the overlapping of human limb components could occur in both range and velocity dimensions of the radar echo, which makes it difficult to distinguish the limbs. In this study, a trajectory tracking and recombination method based on range‐Doppler‐time data is proposed for gait feature estimation under insufficient radar resolution. In the trajectory tracking step, the scattering amplitude is included for Kalman filtering, and the weighted joint nearest neighbour algorithm is proposed for data association. Then, the trajectories are recombined to construct the limb tracks based on the relative range‐Doppler angles. Finally, the limb tracks are used to estimate the spatial‐temporal and kinematic gait features. In our simulation, the trajectory tracking accuracies range from 98.2% to 99.6%. The gait feature estimation accuracies for simulation and measurement are no less than 91.9% and 93.8% respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter proposes an efficient tensor model for Direction of Departure (DOD) and Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation based on bistatic nested Multiple‐Input Multiple‐Output (MIMO) radar. Tensor offers a robust solution in characterizing multi‐dimensional data structures, ensuring data integrity, and has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in the realm of multi‐dimensional parameter estimation. However, the complexity of traditional methods for constructing tensors is a major obstacle to practical applications. In response, this research introduces a novel approach that utilizes an iterative two‐dimensional Toeplitz matrix reconstruction method to rapidly derive expanded virtual covariance matrices prior to tensor construction. This streamlines the algorithm and improves efficiency. Numerical simulations have verified the superiority of this algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) renderings in 3D provide additional target information when compared to 2D by separating out features overlaid in height. However, the required 2D SAR aperture, when Nyquist sampled, necessitates large scanning times that would be impractical for most realistic collections. This research has developed a novel volumetric approach to sparse aperture 3D SAR imaging, which is applicable to bistatic SAR near‐field geometries, a generalization of far‐field cases. This approach is first demonstrated in simulation and then applied to a measured scene containing a model vehicle target, producing sub‐Nyquist sampled 3D SAR renderings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The joint design problem for the coexistence of multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) radar and multi‐user multiple‐input‐single‐output (MU‐MISO) communication is investigated. Different from the conventional design schemes, which require defining the primary function, we consider designing the transmit waveform, precoding matrix and receive filter to maximize the radar SINR and the minimal SINR of communication users, simultaneously. By doing so, the promising overall performance for both sensing and communication is achieved without requiring parameter tuning for the threshold of communication or radar. However, the resulting optimization problem which contains the maximin objective function and the unit sphere constraint, is highly nonconvex and hence difficult to attain the optimal solution directly. Towards this end, the epigraph‐form reformulation is first adopted, and then an alternating maximisation (AM) method is devised, in which the Dinkelbach's algorithm is used to tackle the nonconvex fractional‐programing subproblem. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can achieve improved performance compared with the benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) radar waveform design in a spectrally crowded environment is a challenging problem. In this study, the issue of MIMO radar waveform design in coexistence with communication systems is investigated by maximising the output signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) of the MIMO radar under transmit energy, similarity and spectral compatibility constraints. Different from the existing alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) proposed in a single‐antenna scenario, a novel ADMM algorithm for spectrally compatible MIMO radar waveform design is proposed to efficiently tackle the non‐convex optimisation problem in both single‐antenna and multi‐antenna scenarios. Due to the decomposability of ADMM, only a few quadratic programming subproblems need to be solved during each iteration in the authors' algorithm, which reduces the computational complexity. In numerical simulations, the proposed ADMM algorithm is compared with the semidefinite relaxation algorithm and the existing ADMM algorithm in a single‐antenna scenario and a multi‐antenna scenario, respectively. It shows that the proposed ADMM algorithm can achieve almost the same performance as the two existing algorithms; however, it is computationally more efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the waveform design for Rician target detection with multiple‐input‐multiple‐output radar is addressed. The relative entropy between the distributions of the observations under two hypotheses is employed as the design metric. Due to the difficulty of tackling the non‐convex waveform design problem, a novel algorithm based on minorisation‐maximisation is developed. Since a simple quadratic function is established to minorise the objective function, the presented algorithm has lower computational complexity than its counterparts. Moreover, it can be extended to design waveforms under many practical constraints, including the constant‐envelope constraint, the similarity constraint, and the constant‐envelope and similarity constraints. Numerical results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for detecting Rician targets. Moreover, the designed waveforms can be used to enhance the detection performance of a Swerling 0 target in the presence of angle mismatch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sparse frequency agile linear frequency modulation-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LFM-OFDM) radar can improve anti-interference ability as well as reduce the sampling rate of the radar system. However, the frequency agility makes it difficult to realize coherent processing by using the fast Fourier transform. To overcome this problem, a signal processing scheme for the sparse frequency agile LFM-OFDM radar is proposed to obtain the high range and Doppler resolution in this study. The subcarriers are synthesised to an LFM signal in the time domain at first. Then, within the framework of the compressed sensing theory, an improved orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm is proposed to obtain the high-resolution range-velocity profile while reducing the computation complexity. Finally, several numerical simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for moving targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of operating a radar system multistatically is to acquire information about targets of interest more quickly and reliably than would be possible using disparate radars, which fuse data and track post‐detection. This paper identifies and addresses the critical issues for designing a coherent multistatic radar system using conventional coherent radars and proposes a set of design principles for configuring a coherent multistatic radar network with the aim of maximising the utility of information while constraining system cost and complexity. The issues discussed are as follows: the localisation of targets in three dimensions; eliminating the inevitable spatial ambiguities arising from sparse spatial sampling while exploiting the large aperture for high resolution; the achievement of spatial coherent processing gain for target detection; the effect of phase centre localisation, phase and frequency errors on synchronisation; the incorporation of three‐dimensional Doppler estimation for slow‐time coherent integration. The arguments presented are physically‐based and complemented by mathematical analysis and numerical experimentation using non‐linear sparse estimation, the sparse algorithm being critically important for resolving spatial ambiguities. An optimal configuration is identified, which has sufficiently many nodes to overcome spatial ambiguities and achieves significant spatial coherent processing gain, while simultaneously constraining the overheads of inter‐node synchronisation and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the key technologies of electromagnetic spectrum operations, radar waveform recognition is an important basis for judging the threat degree of enemy's weapons. At present, it is difficult to recognize the waveform at low signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR), and the theoretical simulation is used in most research studies, which leads to the problem that the engineering practicality of the algorithm is poor. In this paper, a two‐stream convolutional network radar waveform recognition (TCNRWR) algorithm that fuses the original time–frequency image and the continuous frames autocorrelation time–frequency image is proposed, and an experimental platform is built by using software defined radio technology. Compared with traditional theoretical simulations, this paper focusses on the influence of spatial background interference and signal incompleteness on the recognition of intra‐pulse signals, and proposes an automatic removal method of invalid signal in the time–frequency domain. In order to further improve the recognition rate at low SNR, a deeper feature of short‐time autocorrelation flow is excavated, and a two‐stream time–frequency images fusion convolutional network (TTIFCNet) is constructed. The network effectively fuses the pre‐classification results of the two streams through Softmax layer and different weights. Finally, the hardware platform HackRF is used to realize the communication and processing of signals in real space, which proves the effectiveness of the TCNRWR algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a microwave or millimetre wave radar system, this study aims to achieve highly accurate Doppler velocity estimation and radar imaging that would be suitable for various remote‐sensing sensors, such as self‐driving, surveillance, or security applications. In particular, micro‐Doppler signatures are one of the most promising approaches for human recognition; however, the traditional limitations of both velocity and temporal resolution need to be addressed. The weighted kernel density (WKD) algorithm using super‐resolution Doppler velocity estimation has been one solution. Using WKD, this study incorporates the range points migration (RPM) method of radar imaging to enhance accuracy in both Doppler velocity and radar imaging using an iterative data selection scheme. Furthermore, to obtain more informative Doppler‐associated RPM‐based images using less data by exploiting a unique feature of WKD and RPM methods, this study introduces the image integration approach along the slow‐time profile. In this framework, bi‐directional data processing between Doppler velocity and imaging analysis is achieved. At each pulse hit sequence, both numerical and experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed method yields a more accurate Doppler‐associated radar image compared with the methods in previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study deals with the problem of outlier censoring from the secondary data in a radar scenario, where the number of outliers is unknown. To this end, a procedure consisting of joint likelihood estimation and statistical model order selection (MOS) is proposed. Since the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of the outlier subset requires to solve a combinatorial problem, an approximate ML (AML) method is employed to reduce the complexity. Therefore, to determine the number of outliers, different MOS criteria based on likelihood function are applied. At the analysis stage, the performance of the proposed methods is assessed based on simulated data. The results highlight that the devised algorithms exhibit satisfactory performance with efficient complexity at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequency shift keying (FSK) signal has been widely used in modern radar systems. To intercept the FSK radar signal with a high interception probability, radar reconnaissance receiver should have an ultra‐wideband receiving ability. The Nyquist folding receiver (NYFR) is a novel non‐cooperative ultra‐wideband receiver and it requires a small amount of equipment. When the FSK radar signal is intercepted by the NYFR, the corresponding output is a hybrid modulation signal. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the parameter estimation of FSK radar signal intercepted by the NYFR. Herein, based on the NYFR using sinusoidal frequency modulation local oscillator (LO), the drawbacks of several existing parameter estimation methods are first analysed. To overcome these drawbacks, the NYFR architecture is improved by changing the LO modulation type to periodic linear frequency modulation. Then, based on the improved NYFR, a novel parameter estimation approach is proposed according to the LO modulation characteristics and the template matching rule. The proposed method is suitable for different kinds of common FSK radar signal code schemes and its computational load is low. At last, several simulation results show the merits of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a distributed coherent aperture radar, the time delay differences and the phase differences among received echoes from each pair of transmitter–receiver should be estimated and then can be compensated to realise coherent processing. Most of the existing algorithms improve the outputs of the matched filtered signals of each transmitter–receiver pair separately. In this study, a structure of equal time delay differences existing in the signal model can be exploited to jointly perform coherence parameter estimation. With this idea, a structure-based joint estimation algorithm is presented to enhance the performance of the coherence parameter estimation. Simulation results verify that this algorithm can have better estimation performance compared with some existing algorithms in the case of low signal-to-noise ratios. Especially, its performance advantage is more significant in the multiple nearfield target scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study has been made to improve the detection capacity of radar using phase coded waveforms especially the Golay set sequence while keeping the sidelobe ambiguity function to the possible minimum. This Letter begins with a description of Golay complementary sets construction from a graph and a determination of the parameters on which they depend to be optimised after. Then, the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm has been proposed to deal with low ambiguity problem of the Golay set, due to its simplicity and also to its effectiveness to solve this kind of problem. Simulation results show that the optimisation with SA has impressively improved the sidelobe rejection of Golay set sequences with a gain of up to 20 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fractional-N phase locked loops (PLLs) offer a low-cost solution to the precision frequency ramp requirements of frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar. In this application, however, the infamous spurious signals generated by these PLLs have not received adequate analysis. In this Letter, the authors investigate the impact of integer boundary spurs on FMCW radar performance. They show that the offset of these spurs is swept during the course of waveform generation, and that undesirable spur chirps manifest in the beat signal as a result. These spur chirps span the radar's intermediate frequency bandwidth and produce Fresnel ripples in the range profile which reduce spurious-free dynamic range. They present simulations and measurements that demonstrate how reduction of PLL bandwidth can be used to suppress these spurii. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]