Experimental Study of Maritime Moving Target Detection Using Hitchhiking Bistatic Radar

Abstract

Hitchhiking bistatic radar system takes the direct wave signal that is transmitted by the non-cooperative radar emitter as the reference to detect and analyze the target echo signal, so as to realize the positioning and tracking of the target. This radar system has the advantages of low cost and strong survivability. Aiming at the problem of passive radar to covert the detection of maritime targets, this paper develops a hitchhiking bistatic radar system for maritime target detection, which uses the shore-based radar as the non-cooperative radar emitter. By continuously collecting the direct wave and target echo data of the non-cooperative radar, the direct wave reference signal reconstruction, pulse compression, interference suppression and synchronization processing, non-coherent integration, MTI (moving target indication), clutter map processing, and adaptive CFAR (constant false alarm rate) detection are completed to obtain the azimuth, bistatic range, and Doppler frequency of the target, and finally realize the positioning of non-cooperative maritime targets. This paper first introduces and demonstrates the composition principle of the system, introduces the signal processing implementation method of the system in detail, and tests and analyzes the key algorithms. The experimental results show that the system can realize the passive coherent detection of maritime moving targets and locate multiple targets at the same time. The experiment obtains a very clear PPI (plane position indicator) display picture of the hitchhiking bistatic radar system, and the radar detection data of the experimental system is in good agreement with the AIS (automatic identification system) data.