Long-Time Coherent Integration for the Spatial-Based Bistatic Radar Based on Dual-Scale Decomposition and Conditioned CPF

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of weak maneuvering target detection in the space-based bistatic radar system through long-time coherent integration (LTCI). The space-based bistatic radar is vulnerable to the high-order range migration (RM) and Doppler frequency migration (DFM), since the target, the receiver and the transmitter all can play fast movement independently. To correct high- order RM and DFM, this usually involves joint high-dimensional parameter searching, incurring a large computational burden. In our previous work, a dual-scale (DS) decomposition of motion parameters was proposed, in which the optimal GRFT is conditionally decoupled into two cascade procedures called the modified generalized inverse Fourier transform (GIFT) and generalized Fourier transform (GFT), resulting in the DS-GRFT detector. However, even if the DS-GRFT detector preserves the superior performance and dramatically decreases the complexity, high-dimensional searching is still required. In this paper, by analyzing the structure of the DS-GRFT detector, we further designed a conditioned cubic phase function (CCPF) tailored to the range–slow-time signal after GIFT, breaking the joint high-dimensional searching into independent one-dimensional searching. Then, by connecting the proposed CCPF with the GIFT, we achieved a new LTCI detector called the DS-GIFT-CCPF detector, which obtained a significant computational cost reduction with acceptable performance loss, as demonstrated in numerical experiments.