High-order RM and DFM correction method for long-time coherent integration of highly maneuvering target

The high-order range migration (RM) and Doppler frequency migration (DFM) induced by the high-order motion parameters will lead to severe performance loss for long-time coherent integration of highly maneuvering target. Therefore, in this paper, a high-order RM and DFM correction method is proposed. To be specific, an auto-correlation function (ACF) is first presented to correct the RM. Then, the residual high-order and linear DFM are eliminated by the polynomial-phase transform (PPT) and Lv’s distribution (LVD), respectively. Besides, the motion parameters of the maneuvering target can also be obtained based on the peak location after LVD. The computational complexity of the proposed method is low. Meanwhile, compared with the adjacent cross correlation function (ACCF)-based methods which have comparable computational cost, the proposed method can achieve RM correction without any restriction and can obtain high motion parameter resolution. Simulations are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed method from computational complexity, coherent integration ability and detection performance. Additionally, the real experiment with X-band radar is also conducted to verify the effectiveness.