Long-Time Coherent Integration for Maneuvering Target Based on Second-Order Keystone Transform and Lv’s Distribution

Abstract

Maneuvering target detection is a challenging task for radar due to its maneuverability and weak energy. Long-term coherent integration can remarkably increase signal energy to improve the target detection ability. Unfortunately, high velocity and acceleration of the target will produce linear range migration (LRM), quadratic range migration (QRM), and Doppler frequency migration (DFM), which seriously degrades the coherent integration gain and further deteriorates target detection performance. To solve this problem, a method based on second-order Keystone transform (SKT) and Lv’s distribution (LVD), also combined with Radon Fourier transform (RFT), i.e., SKTLVD, is proposed in this paper. The LRM is firstly corrected by using RFT. Then, the SKT is employed to remove QRM. Finally, LVD is utilized to eliminate the DFM and achieve coherent integration. Compared with several representative methods, the SKTLVD consumes low computation and obtains good target detection performance, striking a balance between computational cost and target detection ability. Numerical simulations and real measured radar data demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain considerable coherent integral gain under acceptable computational complexity.