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The synergy of active and passive microwave measurements has attracted considerable attention in recent years since they offer complementary information on the characteristics of the observed target (e.g., soil moisture), which motivates the launch of NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. An assumption of a near-linear relationship between active and passive measurements has been made in the SMAP active-passive baseline algorithm, which is essential to downscale coarse-resolution radiometer brightness temperature (TB) using high-resolution radar backscatter (σ⁰) but has not yet been fully tested under a wide range of ground conditions. Motivated by this, we first examined the validity of the linear assumption by using concurrent and coincident SMAP active and passive observations under diverse environmental factors (e.g., land cover, climate types, terrain and its complexity, soil texture, vegetation coverage, soil moisture, and its dynamics). We also adopted SMAP enhanced TB to evaluate the performance of the disaggregated TB at the same grid resolution of 9 km. The results reveal there is a generally good linear relationship between σ⁰ (no matter in dB or in linear unit) and TB at a global scale. There is no significant difference in the correlation among the four polarization combinations ( $σ ⁰_{hh}$ versus TB $_{h}$ , $σ⁰_{hh}$ versus TB $_{v}$ , $σ⁰_{vv}$ versus TB $_{h}$ , and $σ⁰_{vv}$ versus TB $_{v}$ ) with the $σ⁰_{vv}$ and TB $_{h}$ combination displaying an overall slightly higher correlation. The linear relationship between σ⁰ and TB is significantly affected by environmental factors. Particularly in bare soils and densely vegetated areas (e.g., large forest fraction and vegetation coverage), and arid and polar climate zones, the linear correlation between active and passive measurements worsens, whereas it is favorable in moderate vegetation and soil moisture as well as large soil moisture dynamic conditions. Interestingly, the linear correlation generally decreases as sand content increases while increases with the increase of clay content. The absolute linear correlation coefficient is higher with larger soil moisture dynamics. When compared to SMAP enhanced TB, it shows the linear assumption may have more influence on the correlation (i.e., temporal evolution) of downscaled TB than its absolute accuracy. These findings can enhance the understanding of the geophysical relationship between radar and radiometer signatures, and thus benefit active-passive joint algorithms for future satellite missions.

This letter deals with the joint design of transmit waveform and receive filter bank for airborne multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar under the target uncertainties. Assuming that the spatial angle and the Doppler frequency of the target are unknown, we formulate the maximin joint design problem by maximizing the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) under the energy constraint, flexible modulus constraint, and similarity constraint on the \textcolor{red} {transmit} waveform. To tackle this problem, we develop a computationally efficient algorithm based on iterative feasible point pursuit successive convex approximation (FPP-SCA). Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Synthetic aperture radar raw data simulation (SAR-RDS) is beneficial to the SAR system design, signal processing method verification, and radar parameter optimization. Most SAR-RDS methods are based on the flat terrain assumption. However, the fluctuant terrain in real scene will induce severe SAR beam occlusion effect and produce radar shadow, leading to incorrect RDS results. Thus, a dynamic elevation angle interpolation (DEAI) algorithm is proposed for SAR shadow judgment by considering the actual SAR working process. The key of the proposed DEAI algorithm is the 1-D EAI and shadow visualization update, which avoids the problem that the existing methods cannot judge the shadow of partial areas due to the insufficiently refined mesh grid or the mismatch of the judgment model. Moreover, an evaluation framework named as joint image and signal criteria (JISC) is proposed from the perspectives of SAR imaging and signal processing results to objectively evaluate the SAR-RDS results and solve the problem that the existing evaluation methods cannot be compatible with fluctuant terrain. Finally, the numerical experiment verified our theoretical analyses.

Ionospheric Faraday rotation distorts satellite radar observations of the Earth's surface. While its impact on radiometric observables is well understood, the errors in repeat-pass interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations and hence in deformation analysis are largely unknown. Because Faraday rotation cannot rigorously be compensated for in nonquad-pol systems, it is imperative to determine the magnitude and nature of the deformation errors. Focusing on distributed targets at L-band, we assess the errors for a range of land covers using airborne observations with simulated Faraday rotation. We find that the deformation error may reach 2 mm in the copol channels over a solar cycle. It can exceed 5 mm for intense solar maxima. The cross-pol channel is more susceptible to severe errors. We identify the leakage of polarimetric phase contributions into the interferometric phase as a dominant error source. The polarimetric scattering characteristics induce a systematic dependence of the Faraday-induced deformation errors on land cover and topography. Also, their temporal characteristics, with pronounced seasonal and quasi-decadal variability, predispose these systematic errors to be misinterpreted as deformation. While the relatively small magnitude of 1-2 mm is of limited concern in many applications, the persistence on semiannual to multiannual time scales compels attention when long-term deformation is to be estimated with millimetric accuracy. Phase errors induced by uncompensated Faraday rotation constitute a nonnegligible source of bias in interferometric deformation measurements.

Existing compressed sensing algorithms fail when applied to radar target detection in the presence of a large gap in the frequency band, i.e., presence of signals in separate, discontinuous bands. A new algorithm based on a subdivision-fusion scheme is proposed to solve this problem. The main goal is to use a structured sensing matrix based on radar signals to an advantage and obtain a good range resolution in spite of high coherence. Parameters influencing the performance of the algorithm are discussed. Simulative examples and results based on real measurement data are presented. The results show superior performance of the proposed method in the presence of band gaps.

In this paper, an ultra-wideband (UWB) radar is firstly employed to probe through the opaque wall media to detect behind-the-wall human motions. By employing such a radar, a high-resolution time-range map with different body parts’ reflections highly discriminable in range direction can be obtained. Secondly, a high-pass filter is applied to remove the wall effects in the raw time-range map. Then, with the aim of exploiting the rich range information so as to enhance their corresponding micro-Doppler features, a novel range-max enhancement strategy is proposed to extract the most significant micro-Doppler feature of each time-frequency cell along range direction for a specific motion. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed motion feature enhancement strategy is investigated by means of onsite experiments. Comparative classifications using different convolutional neural network structures (CNNs) show that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-art micro-Doppler feature extraction methods. The comparison with narrowband detection case also proves its superiority in feature enhancement in narrowband detection scene.

One of the scientific payloads of Chang'E-5 (CE-5), i.e., the lunar penetrating array radar (LRPR), will carry out the in situ exploration of the regolith structure and guide the drilling sampling ...

Human motion recognition based on ultra-wideband through-the-wall radar (UWB TWR) (a radar whose fractional bandwidth of the radar transmitted signal is bigger than 0.25) is faced with the problems of too few samples and the limitation of perspective. In this letter, we propose a multiradar cooperative human motion recognition model based on transfer learning and ensemble learning. Specifically, a ResNeXt network model based on transfer learning is first proposed to deal with the problem of too few samples. The model is pretrained on the public ImageNet database, and then it is transferred to the task of human motion recognition based on multiradar. Compared with a typical convolutional neural network from scratch, the ResNeXt network model based on transfer learning requires shorter epochs and achieves higher accuracy. Then, to solve the problem of model accuracy decline caused by the limitation of perspective, a multiradar human motion recognition model based on ensemble learning is proposed. Experimental results show that compared with the fusion model based on single-view radar, the recognition accuracy of network based on ensemble learning can be higher.

Although the traditional water-level observation has been improved by wide application of satellite altimetry, the acquisition of fully-covered, long-term water level is impeded by the inadequacies of radar/laser altimetry sensors. Alternatively, the water level of lakes in various sizes can be obtained by combining multitemporal lake shorelines and superimposed topographic information [e.g., digital elevation model (DEM)]. However, the quantification and reduction approach of the uncertainty of water levels reconstructed from the topographic data remains largely unexplored. Therefore, this study aims to develop an improved DEM-based method for reconstructing long-term water levels for ungauged lakes. Before this, we first assessed the characteristics of vertical height uncertainties of DEMs varying with topographic slopes. Assessment results for DEM evaluated based on ICESat-2 show that higher spatial resolution DEMs (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM and AW3D DEM) achieve a higher vertical accuracy with the mean absolute error (MAE) of 3.67 and 3.46 m, respectively, while the mean error will decrease to 1.8 m upon the slope below 1°. Our study confirms that terrain relief exerts strong influences on the DEM data quality. As the DEMs show higher error in steeper terrain, the proposed method first selects the lake bank sites at gentle slopes as the virtual stations and then reconstructs water-level series by superimposing lake shorelines over DEMs at the virtual stations. Results revealed that the reconstructed lake levels show strong correlations with the Hydroweb water level from altimetry data with an R² close to 0.90. Furthermore, we found that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based DEM is expected to have much better performance in the virtual station method.

Protective measures against small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vital from a national security perspective. As a result, the importance of surveillance systems that automatically identify and classify low radar cross section (RCS) aerial targets increases. In this work, an indigenously developed continuous wave (CW) (X-band: 10 GHz) radar is used to build a diversified ``DIAT-μSAT'' dataset comprising 4849 micro-Doppler signature images of five different small aerial targets. We also proposed a transfer learning-based deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) approach for classifying low RCS aerial targets. We demonstrated the classification accuracy of 95% and 97%, with VGG16 and VGG19 as feature extractors, respectively, with minimal false-negative and -positive results. The open-field experimental classes covered in this work are: 1) a two-blade rotor; 2) a three-short-blade rotor; 3) a three-long-blade rotor; 4) a quadcopter; 5) a bionic bird; and 6) a two-blade-rotor and bionic bird. We also observed a good classification accuracy (>97%) when more than one target is operated simultaneously.

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) plays an important role in vessel target surveillance. However, HFSWR's inaccuracy of azimuth estimation caused by wide beams severely limits its detection ability. To solve this problem, a novel direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method based on extreme learning machine optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO-ELM) is proposed to improve azimuth estimation accuracy for HFSWR. This method can obtain the optimal solution without searching the whole angle range of HFSWR. Specifically, PSO optimizes the input weight and hidden layer bias of ELM to obtain optimal parameters for improving the estimation performance. Based on the optimized parameters, the ELM network can give an optimal azimuth estimation in the sense of least squares and minimal norm. The sample sets used for PSO-ELM training are obtained by matching the points detected by HFSWR with the target points reported by an automatic identification system (AIS) on the range-Doppler (RD) spectra. The performance of DOA estimation is verified by field HFSWR data. The experimental results show that the new method has lower root-mean-square error and higher computational efficiency in comparison to the typical DOA estimation methods, such as digital beam forming (DBF) and multiple signal classification (MUSIC). It also uses the machine learning methods, such as back propagation neural network (BPNN) and support vector regression (SVR).

The dual-frequency precipitation radar (DPR) onboard the global precipitation measurement (GPM) satellite provides valuable measurements of precipitation. In this study, the GPM DPR products (version 6) are validated against a ground-based S-band polarimetric radar in South China based on a volume-matching method. Good consistency is found for the reflectivity factor (Z) calibration of the two instruments. From the perspective of microphysics, the mass-weighted mean diameter ( $D_{m})$ estimates correspond well with those of the ground-based radar in the inner swath of the normal scan (NS); however, underestimation is found for the raindrop number concentration, indicated by the generalized intercept parameter ( $N_{w})$ , especially for the intense echoes. Thus, the GPM DPR product may fail to depict the microphysical characteristics of small-to-medium raindrops in high concentration for heavy rainfall in South China. This is attributed to the negative Z bias of the DPR caused probably by insufficient correction of attenuation, which also leads to clear underestimation in the liquid water content (W) and the rainfall rate (R) products for intense echoes. In the outer swath where only single-frequency retrieval is available, overestimation in $D_{m}$ exists regardless of echo intensity level, and more underestimation can be found in $N_{w}$ , W, and R especially for intense echoes. In the selected typhoon and squall line cases, better capability in revealing microphysical properties is also found for the inner swath of the NS. After adjusting the scan mode, the performance of the precipitation products in the outer swath can be improved by dual-frequency retrievals in the future.

The clutter encountered in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) systems seriously affects the performance of the subsurface target detection methods. A new clutter removal method based on convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) is introduced. The raw GPR image is encoded via successive convolution and pooling layers and then decoded to provide the clutter-free GPR image. The loss function is defined in terms of the reference clutter-free target image and the decoder output is optimized to learn the weight coefficients from the raw data. The method is compared to the conventional subspace methods, recently proposed nonnegative matrix factorization, as well as low-rank and sparse decomposition (LRSD) methods and dictionary separation-based morphological component analysis. CAE and its deeper version deep CAE (DCAE) are trained by several scenarios generated by the electromagnetic simulation tool gprMax. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for challenging scenarios. While for real GPR image, the simulated data trained networks remain slightly behind the LRSD methods for the dry case, nonetheless, they outperform the aforementioned processing techniques for the more challenging wet case.

This paper deals with the problem of adaptive moving target detection, embedded in homogeneous Gaussian noise with unknown covariance matrix, for frequency diverse array multiple-input multiple-output (FDA-MIMO) radar operating in interference-dominant environment. Unlike traditional adaptive moving target detectors that need training data to estimate the jamming covariance matrix (JCM), we present the Rao and Wald test based adaptive detector, which requires no training data. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage approach to obtain maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of the joint range, angle and Doppler, respectively. The corresponding signal-to-jamming-plus-noise ratio (SJNR) is derived to evaluate the FDA-MIMO radar performance. Simulation results show that the proposed detector outperforms the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT).

In this article, an efficient radar fusion-before-imaging (RFBI) method for heterogeneous borehole radar systems is proposed. Different from conventional fusion-after-imaging processes, the sample sets collected from heterogeneous borehole radar systems (monostatic, bistatic, or multiple-input multiple-output) are first merged into one data set before the imaging process in RFBI, and a single imaging operation is demanded to obtain the target space image with high precision. Specifically, the diversity in heterogeneous borehole radar sample sets is taken into consideration, and the radar sample sets are inserted and fused into a high-dimensional sample set before imaging. The target space spectrum is generated according to the echo space-frequency constraint relationship, and the target space is extracted from one imaging process. The influence of clutters in RFBI results is reduced, and the imaging accuracy is satisfactory. Meanwhile, due to the fusion process ahead, the computational time of RFBI hardly increases with the number of radar sample sets. The synthetic and field experiment results show that RFBI demonstrates comparable accuracy as Kirchhoff migration and higher efficiency in processing large amounts of data sets at the cost of large memory requirement, which is suitable for the joint imaging of heterogeneous radar systems.

Existing works on radar high-resolution range profile (HRRP) recognition commonly focus on utilizing data and various deep learning models in achieving high classification accuracy. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult to obtain HRRP signals, especially for noncooperative targets. Such lack of data dramatically decreases the recognition performance, so this letter applies data augmentation to address small-sample problems. A recognition-aware HRRP generation framework based on a generative adversarial network is proposed for data augmentation, which generates discriminative samples by decomposing and reorganizing signal's characteristics. The proposed model increases the generated signals' discriminative power, thus meeting the application requirements. Experiments show that the generated HRRP signals can not only accurately expand the data set but also improve the recognition system's performance. Besides, the developed model outperforms traditional data augmentation methods and other generative methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on HRRP signal generation in radar automatic target recognition systems.

Quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) is an essential task in meteorology and hydrology and is of great significance for disaster prevention and control. The starting point of QPE is to establish a point-by-point mapping relationship between atmospheric observations and rain gauges. Traditional methods called Z-R relationships fit the parameters in a given paradigm to perform QPE under meteorology prior guidance. Methods based on machine learning (ML) construct the QPE models from statistical views, which could benefit from large historical data. However, in operational applications, these methods are challenging to estimate severe precipitation accurately. The reason is that severe precipitation is usually caused by convective systems. The point-by-point QPEs only focus on fixed isolated points and are difficult to characterize convective systems that cause precipitation effectively. In this letter, a spatiotemporal attention model is proposed for one-hour QPE. For each pixel, the spatiotemporal attention guides the model to find and focus on the most worthy attention region at each moment instead of a definite isolated point, making the model view more flexible and insightful. In experiments, the radar data from 2015 to 2016 in North China are used to train and evaluate the model. Compared with other methods, the results show that the spatiotemporal attention model could effectively improve the accuracy of QPE, especially for intense precipitation. The case study also shows that the operation of our model is more consistent with meteorological perspectives.

A cascaded regional people counting approach based on two-dimensional (2-D) spatial attribute features using multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar is presented in this letter. The main task is to detect whether there is a target, and to classify the number of people in a closed metal ramp. The difficulty to accurately detect the number of people lies in the presence of strong static clutter and the strong multipath effects in the environment. In this letter, range-angle spectrum is first computed and exploited to extract the 2-D spatial attribute features, namely the effective peaks of range-angle spectrum, the spacing features and the energy block features. These features reflect the relative position relationships between the people and the environment as well as the physical structure of a certain environment. Then, a maximum likelihood classifier and a random forest classifier are cascaded and applied to detect the target presence and classify the number of people. The experiment results show that the average classification accuracy of 0 person, 1 person, and multiple persons is above 92.55%, which outperforms the existing people counting approaches.

Arc synthetic aperture radar (ArcSAR) is a ground-based remote imaging technology with the ability to cover wide fields of view. However, because its azimuth is formed by scanning angle rotation, the focusing of ArcSAR images is different from classical SAR focusing. Since the existing imaging methods cannot give a good balance between computational efficiency and accuracy, the wavenumber domain algorithm (WMA) could become an interesting alternative. Due to the fact that in ArcSAR imaging, the slant range measurement depends on a sine term of the scanning angle, no dedicated WMA-based approach for ArcSAR imaging has been formulated yet. The main challenge in this context is that the solution of the stationary phase point cannot be resolved explicitly via Fourier transform (FT). This article proposes a new wavenumber domain imaging method, which exploits the sine law in the process of solving the stationary phase point during FT along the direction of the received echo using the triangular relationship formed by the target, the radar, and the rotation center of radar and then obtains the exact phase error expression in range and angular wavenumber domain without any approximation of the slant range or scanning angle. Using this formulation, we develop the corresponding phase error compensation method and complete image focusing. Through point target simulation and experiments on real ArcSAR data, the effectiveness of this method is verified in terms of imaging accuracy and computational efficiency.

Non-uniform beam filling (NUBF) within an atmospheric radar sampling volume can cause significant Doppler velocity errors when the radar is located on a fast-moving platform. A case of strong NUBF errors was identified in ER-2 X-band Radar (EXRAD) data from the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) 2020 field campaign. A basic NUBF correction was employed using an estimate of the along-track radar reflectivity gradient. The relationship is verified empirically using co-located Doppler velocity measurements from the higher-resolution Cloud Radar System (CRS).

Insufficient data of a noncooperative target seriously affect the performance of radar automatic target recognition (RATR) using the high-resolution range profile (HRRP), especially when the noncooperative target has only one sample. To this end, we propose an unsupervised data generation method to generate noncooperative HRRP signals. We utilize the pretrained generative adversarial networks (GANs) model to learn the HRRP general probability distribution. To emphasize the representative and discriminative power of generated HRRP signals, a joint optimization method is proposed to preserve category information. Moreover, a feature diversification method is proposed to make the generated samples have sufficient aspect characteristics to further fit the probability distribution of the noncooperative target. Thus, the generated HRRP signals can effectively improve the recognition performance of noncooperative target. Extensive experiments on HRRP data sets demonstrate the superior performance of our method over other state-of-the-art methods.

The holographic subsurface radar (HSR) is recognized as an effective remote sensing modality for the detection of shallowly buried objects with a high-resolution image in plain view. However, subsurface detection with HSR is prone to be impaired by clutter contamination, which often obscures the target response. In this letter, a novel clutter mitigation method combining singular value decomposition (SVD) and response cross correlation analysis is presented. The proposed method first applies SVD to decompose the radar data matrix to a number of singular components. Furthermore, the signal cross correlation characteristics are analyzed to demonstrate that the variance of left singular vectors is directly proportional to the target proportion in radar data. Then, target and clutter subspaces can be identified by maximizing the defined weighted target-to-clutter ratio (WTCR). Results of numerical simulation and laboratory experiments corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing clutter while preserving the target image.

Weather radars play an important role in in situ rainfall monitoring owing to their ability to measure instantaneous rain rates and rainfall distributions. Currently, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) provides instantaneous radar observation data and predictions based on the McGill algorithm for precipitation nowcasting by Lagrangian extrapolation (MAPLE) for up to 6 h, for short-term forecasting. This study presents a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN)-based radar rainfall prediction method for very short-range weather forecasts from 10 min to 4 h. The CGAN-predicted model was trained and tested using KMA's constant altitude plan position indicator (CAPPI) observation data. The qualitative comparison between the radar observation and the CGAN-predicted rain rates displayed high statistical scores, such as the probability of detection (POD) = 0.8442, false alarm ratio (FAR) = 0.2913, and critical success index (CSI) = 0.6268, in the case of a 1-h prediction for rainfall on September 5, 2019, 15:20 KST. This study demonstrates the capability of the CGAN model for short-term rainfall forecasting. Consequently, the CGAN-generated radar-based rainfall prediction could complement the KMA MAPLE system and be useful in various forecasting applications.

Internal decays in trees can rapidly escalate into a full decomposition of the inner structural layer, i.e., the “heartwood” layer, due to the action of aggressive diseases and fungal infections. This process leads to the formation of big cavities and hollows, which remain surrounded by the sapwood layer only. Estimating the thickness of the sapwood layer with a high degree of accuracy is therefore crucial for a correct assessment of the structural integrity of hollow trees, as well as an extremely challenging task. In this context, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has proven effective in providing details of the internal structure of trees. Nevertheless, the existing GPR processing methods still offer limited information on their internal configuration. This study investigates the effectiveness of GPR enhanced by a microwave tomography inversion approach in the assessment of hollow trees. To this aim, a living hollow tree was investigated by performing a set of pseudo-circular scans along the bark perimeter with a hand-held common-offset GPR system. The tree was then felled, and sections were cut for testing purposes. A dedicated data processing framework was developed and tested through numerical simulations of hollow tree sections. The internal structure of the real trunk was therefore reconstructed via a tomographic imaging approach and the outcomes were quantitatively analysed by way of comparison with the real sections’ main geometric features. The tomographic approach has proven very accurate in locating the sapwood-cavity interface as well as in the evaluation of the sapwood layer thickness, with a centimetre prediction accuracy.

Classification of nonprecipitation echoes of radar is an inevitable step in radar-based precipitation estimation. Among nonprecipitation echoes, clear air echoes are specifically difficult to distinguish for their similarity to precipitation echoes. This letter aims to conduct a pixelwise classification of clear air echoes for image sequences of the radar reflectivity. We propose the Static and Motion streams Network (SMNet) to simultaneously utilize the static and motion features. SMNet realizes capturing the spatiotemporal characteristics while maintaining the details of the current frame via a fusion structure and a novel training method. For feature fusion, the static and motion streams are concatenated. Then, for model training, we adopt a dynamic weight assignment strategy to further extract rich information. Finally, we validate our method on an S-band single-polarization radar in Beijing, China, from May to September 2018. The results demonstrate that the overall performance of SMNet is superior to other competitors.

Undesired echo from a flying object (aerial clutter) significantly contaminates the received signal of a wind profiler radar (WPR) because it has high intensity and spreads over a wide Doppler velocity range. In this study, results of aerial clutter mitigation obtained by applying adaptive clutter suppression (ACS) to a 1.3-GHz WPR are shown. The 1.3-GHz WPR used in this study has a main antenna comprising 13 antenna subarrays (MSAs). five-element Yagi-Uda antennas were also used as antenna subarrays for detecting clutters from low elevation angles (CSAs). The CSAs were used only in reception and installed so that they covered most of the horizontal directions and the horizontal and vertical polarizations. The directionally constrained minimization of power (DCMP) method was used as the adaptive signal processing to mitigate clutter. By the DCMP method, the weighted sum of the signals collected by 13 MSAs and 11 CSAs was computed so that the power of output signals was minimized under the constraint of constant gain in the antenna beam direction. Results of a case study for an aerial clutter from a low elevation angle at 17:04:37 on October 1 2020 showed that an overlap of the aerial clutter over a desired echo (i.e., clear-air echo) was solved by decreasing the aerial clutter whose peak intensity was ~24 dB greater than that of the clear-air echo. In a case study at 09:30:27 on September 18 2020, effects of the DCMP method on the processed results were discussed.

Buried craters within tens of meters of lunar regolith are rarely studied but are significant for understanding the evolution of surface processes on the Moon. Here, we first report the evidence of an intact buried crater within the layered strata at Chang'E-4 (CE-4) landing site revealed by the lunar penetrating radar (LPR). The time-frequency comparative analysis method based on the variational mode decomposition (VMD) and the rock quantitative analysis method based on the local unit correlation (LUC) are proposed and applied to the processing and analysis of LPR data within 15 lunar days. The results presented by the two methods provide evidence of a buried crater at the CE-4 landing site and simultaneously reveal the rock-concentrated structure within the buried crater. According to the results, it is considered that the filling materials within the buried crater have survived the impaction and gardening during the formation of the overlying fine-grained regolith. Recent works have proposed that the near-surface material at the CE-4 landing site is mainly the lunar mantle materials excavated from the nearby Finsen crater. Therefore, the buried crater probably preserves the initial lunar mantle materials.

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have become the mainstream in radar ship recognition. However, these methods suffer from two common problems. First, the training samples consist largely of common ship types, giving them an overwhelming numerical advantage over rare ship types. As a result, CNN-based recognition algorithms fail to classify rare ship types correctly. Second, huge high-resolution slices result in heavy computational burdens. To solve the first problem, namely, the class imbalance problem, this letter proposes a CNN training method that combines deep metric learning (DML) with gradually balanced sampling. DML obtains the center of each class in the feature space and performs clustering equally. Gradually balanced sampling adopts a smooth transition from instance-aware resampling to class-aware resampling to improve the recognition rate drop caused by traditional resampling methods. As for the second problem, to reduce the computational complexity of high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a lightweight CNN is also proposed.

形態: カラー図版あり, Physical characteristics: Original contains color illustrations, Accepted: 2020-11-06, 資料番号: PA2110067000

With the popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), how to conduct automatic and effective detection to prevent unauthorized flying has become an important issue. The conventional constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector based on radar signal has shown advantages in moving target detection. However, the CFAR-based detectors are strongly dependent on some manual experience, such as the ambient noise distribution estimation and the detection windows' size selection, and usually suffered poor performance on small UAV detection due to the weak signal. Inspired by the success of deep learning (DL) on natural scene object detection, this article tries to explore a DL-based method for UAV detection in pulse-Doppler radar. Concretely, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) with two heads: one for the classification of the input range-Doppler map patch into target present or target absent and the other for the regression of offset between the target and the patch center. Then, based on the output of the network, a nonmaximum suppression (NMS) mechanism composed of probability-based initial recognition, distribution density-based recognition, and voting-based regression is developed to reduce false alarms as well as control the false alarms. Finally, experiments on both simulated data and real data are carried out, and it is shown that the proposed method can locate the target more accurately and achieve a much lower false alarm rate at a comparable detection rate than CFAR.

With the start of the Spanish PAZ system, another earth observation satellite has become available to the scientific community. Following the launch of the PAZ science phase, we performed a number of ground experiments using different modes of the satellites SAR instrument, measuring the transmitted radar signal as well as its ground reflections using the HITCHHIKER receiver. The data acquired in these experiments is analyzed and used in collaboration with the PAZ calibration team at INTA to characterize the PAZ instrument and thus verify the system calibration. Further we obtained bistatic radar images from the data of the HITCHHIKER ground receiver.

In this letter, we present an adaptive Bayesian detection framework for frequency diverse array multiple-input multiple-output (FDA-MIMO) radar. The targets are detected in Gaussian clutter with unknown but stochastic covariance matrix. We designed two detectors in the Bayesian framework, namely, Bayesian Rao detector and Bayesian Wald detector without training data. Numerical results reveal that the proposed detectors outperform conventional non-Bayesian counterparts. It is necessary to note that the Bayesian Wald detector requires higher computational complexity than the Bayesian Rao detector.

Synthetic aperture radar tomography (TomoSAR) at different radar wavelength can be used to measure different structural elements of forests. In this letter, we compared the airborne P- and L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomograms and TomoSAR-measured canopy height model (CHM) and above-ground biomass (AGB) over a tropical forest in Lope, Gabon. The SAR data sets were acquired by German Aerospace Center (DLR)'s F-SAR system during the AfriSAR2016 campaign. First, the Weighted covariance fitting-based Iterative Spectral Estimator (WISE) was applied to obtain tomograms. CHM was then retrieved based on the canopy phase center derived from the tomograms. Finally, AGB was estimated via an empirical logarithmic model developed from field measurements and the tomographic backscatter power of vegetation layers between 40 and 50 m above ground. Compared with the classical approaches of Capon and Wavelet-based Compressed Sensing, the WISE method can achieve better resolution with higher computational efficiency and reduce the ambiguity level of L-band tomograms successfully. The experimental results also show that there is no substantial difference between P- and L-band TomoCHM, while P-band tomographic intensity is more sensitive than the L-band for the inversion of tropical forest AGB at a resolution of 50 m x 50 m.

The non-uniform beam filling bias in Doppler velocity measurements from a spaceborne precipitation radar is investigated. A simple derivation of the already-known formula that relates the bias to the along-track gradient of measured radar reflectivity in dBZ is shown. From the formula, the uncertainty of bias correction due to discretization is discussed. The error is shown to be proportional to the square of the spacing for discretization, and is related to the third moment of the distribution of the radar reflectivity convolved with the antenna pattern. The effectiveness of averaging is also shown from a simulation.

For nonside-looking airborne radar (NSLAR), the range-dependent near-range clutter degrades the performance of space-time adaptive processing (STAP), especially in the high-pulse-repetition-frequency mode. To solve this problem, a novel algorithm using sparse recovery (SR) and orthogonal projection (OP) is proposed in this letter. First, the elevation angle of short-range clutter is estimated by the off-grid SR method. Second, the near-range clutter is suppressed in the elevation domain by the OP method. Finally, the azimuth-Doppler STAP is carried out to suppress the residual range-independent far-range clutter. The proposed algorithm can obtain the elevation angle of short-range clutter more precisely with only one training snapshot and it is robust since no prior knowledge is needed. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Spectrum sharing in radar bands with interference forecasting for enhanced radar protection can help design proactive resource allocation solutions which can achieve high data rates for wireless communication networks on one hand and help protect the incumbent radar systems. We consider radar spectrum sharing in 5.6GHz where a weather radar operates as a primary system and the dominant secondary system is an enterprise network consisting of access points (APs) in a university campus. Our work models transmit the power of the APs as a time series with multinomial distribution based on real collected data. The aggregated interference due to the transmissions from the APs at the radar is forecasted using a long short-term memory (LSTM) based neural network. Monte Carlo dropout is utilized to generate prediction intervals that capture the uncertainties in the interference from the APs. Finally, by using both average and upper limits of predicted interference time series a cloud-assisted efficient sharing and radar protection algorithm is proposed. Tracking the rotating radar is not required in the proposed system. The results show that the proposed efficient sharing and radar protection system ensures better radar protection and increased throughput for wireless communication users.

The broadening first-order sea clutters caused by the signals from different directions with various radial current velocities create severe disturbance for target detection using high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR). Conventional sea clutter suppression methods tend to remove the sea clutter and target signals when they are mixed in the Doppler spectrum. Based on the characteristics of the target signal and sea clutter in spatial-temporal domain, a new first-order sea clutter suppression method for HFSWR using orthogonal projection is proposed. The proposed method uses the data from multichannels and slow-time domain at the adjacent range cell to construct a covariance matrix, which can be used to obtain the sea clutter subspace by eigendecomposition. Later, original signals are projected onto the sea clutter subspace. Finally, subtract the component of the original signals in the sea clutter subspace from the original signals to achieve the suppression of sea clutter by retaining the target signals. The simulation and experimental results for a single target and multiple targets cases indicate that the proposed method can suppress the first-order sea clutter effectively, which enhances the target detection capacity in the sea clutter zone for HFSWR.

For repeat-pass interferometric systems, temporal decorrelation (TD) is inevitable and cannot be ignored, and can lead to significant bias in the forest height estimation. The TD random volume over ground (TD + RVoG) model has been found to be a reasonable way to describe the scattering process over forest areas. In this letter, based on the TD + RVoG model, a new forest height estimation method is proposed for use with multibaseline polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry (PolInSAR) data. First, the correlation between the ground-to-volume ratios (GVRs) associated with the different polarizations is parameterized according to the geometric interpretation of the RVoG model. An interferometric pair that is assumed to have no TD is then selected based on the eccentricity of the polarimetric coherence region, and the other interferometric pairs are fitted by the TD + RVoG model. E-synthetic aperture radar (E-SAR) P-band PolInSAR data sets affected by TD are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the forest height results are improved by 25.90% when compared to the RVoG-based method.

Fil: Pascual, Juan Pablo. Instutito Balseiro. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Pascual, Juan Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Argentina. Fil: Cogo, Jorge. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Centro Interdisciplinario de Telecomunicaciones, Electrónica, Computación y Ciencia Aplicada. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Cogo, Jorge. Instutito Balseiro. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Collado Rosell, Arturo. Comisión Nacional de Energı́a Atómica (CNEA). Bariloche, Argentina. Fil: Collado Rosell, Arturo. Instutito Balseiro. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Areta, Javier Alberto. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Centro Interdisciplinario de Telecomunicaciones, Electrónica, Computación y Ciencia Aplicada. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Areta, Javier Alberto. Instutito Balseiro. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Areta, Javier Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Argentina. In this article, we present a novel algorithm termed multipulse processing (MPP) for improving mean Doppler velocity estimation in weather radar applications. It can be used for both staggered pulse repetition time (PRT) and uniform-PRT sequences. Essentially, MPP consists of finding a particular zero of a functional composed of data autocorrelation estimates at multiple lags. To select the proper zero, an initial Doppler velocity estimate is required. Therefore, MPP can be considered as an estimation refinement stage. Its advantage lies in the fact that it uses the complete information contained in the radar signal autocorrelation. After a theoretical analysis, we compare the performance of MPP against other well-established methods of similar complexity and the Cramér–Rao lower bound, by means of Monte Carlo simulations using synthetic data. We show that the proposed estimator offers the lowest root-mean-square error (RMSE) at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) situations for a wide range of spectral widths. Finally, we evaluate the MPP algorithm performance using real data measured by the RMA Argentinian weather radar. The results of tests performed are consistent with those of Monte Carlo simulations and validate the proposed method. En este artículo, presentamos un algoritmo novedoso denominado procesamiento multipulso (MPP) para mejorar la estimación de la velocidad Doppler media en aplicaciones de radares meteorológicos. Se puede utilizar tanto para secuencias de tiempo de repetición de pulso (PRT) escalonadas como de PRT uniforme. Esencialmente, MPP consiste en encontrar un cero particular de un funcional compuesto por estimaciones de la autocorrelación de los datos en múltiples retardos. Para seleccionar el cero adecuado, se requiere una estimación inicial de la velocidad Doppler. Por lo tanto, MPP puede considerarse como una etapa de refinamiento de la estimación. Su ventaja radica en que utiliza la información completa contenida en la autocorrelación de la señal del radar. Después de un análisis teórico, comparamos el rendimiento de MPP con otros métodos bien establecidos de complejidad similar y con la cota Cramér-Rao, mediante simulaciones de Monte Carlo utilizando datos sintéticos. Mostramos que el estimador propuesto ofrece el error cuadrático medio (RMSE) más bajo en situaciones de relación señal-ruido (SNR) baja para una amplia gama de anchos espectrales. Finalmente, evaluamos el rendimiento del algoritmo MPP utilizando datos reales medidos por el radar meteorológico argentino RMA. Los resultados de las pruebas realizadas son consistentes con los de las simulaciones de Monte Carlo y validan el método propuesto.

Non-stationary moving target detection in spiky sea clutter is a challenging task due to the high-power, time-varying, and target-like properties of sea spikes. In this paper, we propose a time-frequency correlation (TFC)-based constant false alarm rate (TFC-CFAR) detection method on the Time-frequency manifold, and apply to the non-stationary moving target detection in spiky sea clutter. The data samples in each range cell are modeled as a TFC matrix that captures the correlation between two frequency components of the time frequency distribution. The clutter covariance matrix is estimated by the geometric mean of a set of TFC matrices in reference cells. Three geometric metrics are employed to measure the dissimilarity between the clutter and target signals. Based on these geometric measures, three TFC-CFAR detectors are compared. Experiments performed on real IPIX radar dataset confirm that the TFC can be used for identifying and eliminating sea spikes, while the TFC-CFAR detector achieves better detection performance than the conventional detectors.

For radar modeling and simulation of sea clutter, there are a number of key characteristics used to describe the observed features. These include the mean backscatter power, amplitude statistics, spatial and long-time temporal correlation, and the Doppler spectrum. Regarding the latter, a common modeling approach is to use the mean Doppler characteristics (width and center point) to relate to the sea conditions. However, this does not capture the time- and range-varying fluctuations of the Doppler spectra, which are important for assessing the behavior of coherent detection schemes. The evolving Doppler spectrum model offers a way to model these variations and can be described with a moderate number of parameters. Relating these to the observed geometry, environment and radar characteristics are important to make the models accessible. Previous work has characterized X-band radar sea clutter over a range of sea conditions and azimuth and grazing angles. In this article, new models are presented that capture variations with both the radar resolved area and integration time. This enables the evolved Doppler spectra model to be used over a much wider range of applications.

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can be effectively used to detect ships in the exclusive economic zone. However, the ship signal is concealed and interfered with various clutter and background noise in the Doppler spectrum. In this letter, a range-Doppler (RD) image-based novel ship detection algorithm is proposed by exploiting spatial-frequency information and a unique feature fusion based on the analysis of variance. The algorithm subsumes three successive stages: Stage I--the plausible region of interest is captured, Stage II--the features from different sources are fused into one generalized feature space, and Stage III--an extreme learning machine-based classifier is utilized to localize the ships. Experimental results on challenging HFSWR-RD datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a competitive performance over other ship detection algorithms.

Integrating compressed sensing (CS) with millimeter-wave (mmW) holography has shown great potential to achieve lightweight onboard hardware, low sampling ratio, and high-speed sensing. However, conventional CS-driven algorithms are always limited by nontrivial adjusting of parameters and excessive computational cost caused by plenty of iterations. To address this problem, we propose a lightweight model-based deep learning framework (LFIST-Net) for mmW 3-D holography, by combining the interpretability of fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA) and tuning-free merit of data-driven deep neural network. First, the single-frequency (SF) holographic imaging technique is integrated into FISTA, which serves as the sensing kernels, to avoid large-scale matrix multiplications. Subsequently, the kernel-based FISTA (KFISTA) is mapped into layer-fixed and parameter-learnable LFIST-Net, whose weights are relaxed to be layer-varied. The updating of key parameters in LFIST-Net, including step sizes, thresholds, and momentum coefficients, are regularized by soft-plus function to ensure the non-negativity and monotonicity. As for 3-D holography implementation, the ``1-D + 2-D'' scheme is adopted, where the matched filtering (MF) and well-trained LFIST-Net are used for range focusing and reconstructions of azimuth slices. Without losing efficiency, the range-focused subechoes are processed parallelly in 3-D cube form. Experiments, including both simulated and measured tests based on a commercial mmW radar, prove that LFIST-Net is capable of reconstructing the imaging scene precisely. In particular, in near-field mmW 3-D holography tests, both numerical and visual results demonstrate LFIST-Net yields compelling reconstruction performance while maintaining high computational speed compared with MF-based, conventional CS-driven, and network-based methods.

The rotating phased array radar (RPAR) has the potential to improve the capabilities of the current U.S. Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) operational network and can be more affordable than other candidate phased array radar (PAR) architectures that have been evaluated to replace the WSR-88D. Considering the demanding functional requirements for the future U.S. weather surveillance radar, it is expected that several advanced RPAR scanning techniques will need to be applied simultaneously to achieve them. In this letter, we present the integration of two such RPAR scanning techniques: motion-compensated steering (MCS) and distributed beams (DBs). MCS exploits beam agility to mitigate beam smearing, while DB exploits digital beamforming to reduce the scan time or the standard deviation (SD) of estimates. The integration of these techniques is demonstrated with the National Severe Storms Laboratory's (NSSL) dual-polarization advanced technology demonstrator (ATD) radar system. Results show that these techniques can be used simultaneously to enhance azimuthal resolution and reduce the SD of estimates without impacting data quality if certain obtainable tradeoff considerations are incorporated in the radar design process.

With the development of the radar sensing technology, hand gesture sensing and recognition has attracted much attention. This letter adopts a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar to achieve short-range hand gesture sensing and recognition. Specifically, the range, Doppler, and angle parameters of hand gestures are measured by fast Fourier transformation (FFT) and multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, respectively. The mixup (MP) algorithm combined with augmentation (AU) algorithm using a weight factor is applied to expand the hand gesture data. Then, a complementary multidimensional feature fusion network-based hand gesture recognition (CMFF-HGR) is designed to extract the features and achieve HGR. Finally, a series of experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and the results show that the recognition accuracy is higher than the existing alternatives with low computational complexity.

Target detection is studied for a cloud multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar using quantized measurements. According to the local sensor quantization strategies and fusion strategies, this paper discusses three methods: quantize local test statistics which are linearly fused (QTLF), quantize local test statistics which are optimally fused (QTOF), and quantize local received signals which are optimally fused (QROF). We first directly analyze the detection performance of each method when the quantizer output is represented as a discrete random variable, where it is difficult to obtain a closed-form expression for the detection probability. Then, an approximate description for the quantization is analyzed for the case of a Gaussian signal and a closed-form expression of the detection probability is obtained. We prove that the QTOF method outperforms the QTLF method in general, and for small SCNR the QROF method has the best detection performance among the three methods, while for large SCNR the QROF method performs the worst. The correctness of theoretical analysis is verified by simulations.