Non-MSE Data Compression for Emitter Location for Radar Pulse Trains

This paper ties together and extends several recent results we have presented. We previously showed: (i) the usefulness of non-MSE distortion criteria in data compression for time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) emitter location (SPIE 2001 & 2002), and (ii) the ability to exploit redundancy between radar pulses in a joint TDOA/FDOA (frequency-difference-of-arrival) location scheme (SPIE 2001 & 2002). In (ii) we showed how to compress radar signals by gating around the detected pulses and then putting the pulses into the rows of a matrix which is then compressed through use of the SVD; this approach employed a purely MSE distortion criterion. An open question in this approach was: Is it possible to eliminate some of the pulses from the pulse matrix to increase the compression ratio without significantly sacrificing location accuracy? We resolve this question by applying our proposed non-MSE to the FDOA accuracy and finding the optimal set of pulses to remove from the pulse matrix. The removal of pulses is shown to have negligible impact on the FDOA accuracy but does degrade the TDOA accuracy from that achievable using the SVD-based compression without pulse elimination. However, we demonstrate that the SVD method includes an inherent de-noising effect (common in SVD-based signal processing) that provides an improvement in TDOA accuracy over the case of no compression processing; thus, the overall impact on TDOA/FDOA accuracy is negligible while providing compression ratios on the order of 100:1 for typical radar signals.