Range-spread target detection using the time-frequency feature based on sparse representation

The wideband radar transmitting the linear frequency modulation signal often processes its echoes by the stretched processing. This paper deals with the range-spread target detection in white complex Gaussian noise. Here, we propose a new detection method for the range-spread target based on sparse representation, which selects the time-frequency feature to realise the target detection. It can be simply described as follows: first, the sketched signal is reconstructed from its noisy measurements by basis pursuit de-noising (BPDN); scatterers on the target are determined by its reconstruction and used to calculate the Wigner distribution; for the target embedded in noise, the time-frequency feature in its power-density spectrum is compared with the decision threshold. Meanwhile, the median absolute deviation (MAD) is adopted to estimate the noise variance. The mainly novelties can be concluded as follows: the Fourier matrix is selected to sparsely represent the sketched signal; the sparsity is used to improve the SNR of the received echoes; the Wigner transform is utilised to acquire the time-frequency feature of the range-spread target. Both the optimisation theory and time-frequency representation are introduced to solve the target detection problem. Experimental results on the raw data show that the proposed detector outperforms the conventional methods.