Data compression using SVD and Fisher information for radar emitter location

† Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: This paper presents a data compression method that can achieve a very large compression ratio for radar pulse trains that are to be used for time-difference-of-arrival/frequency-difference-ofarrival (TDOA/FDOA) multiple-platform emitter location; this method exploits pulse-to-pulse redundancy to get a compression ratio much higher than possible using standard compression methods. We show how to use (i) the ability of the singular value decomposition (SVD) to exploit redundancy between radar pulses, and (ii) a Fisher information-based distortion criterion to enable elimination of pulses that are negligible to the FDOA estimation tasks. To enable the SVD to effectively remove the redundancy it is necessary to first optimally gate the pulses and place them in the rows of a matrix and then align the pulses to arrive at a matrix that is close to having rank of one. Finally, we suggest reasonable coding schemes for the information to be sent and assess the achievable compression level. The Fisher information-based 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 denoising 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 up to 100:1 for typical radar signals.