High Resolution Compressed Sensing Radar using Difference Set Codes

In this paper, we consider compressive sensing (CS)based recovery of delays and Doppler frequencies of targets in high resolution radars. We propose a novel sub-Nyquist sampling method in the Fourier domain based on difference sets (DS), called DS-sampling, to create dictionaries with highly incoherent atoms. The coherence of the dictionary reaches the Welch minimum bound if the DS-sampling is employed. This property let us to implement sub-Nyquist high resolution radars with minimum number of samples. We also develop a low complexity recovery method, based on structured CS and propose a new waveform, called difference set–frequency coded modulated (DS-FCM) waveform, to boost the recovery performance of the sub-Nyquist radar in noisy environments. The proposed method solves some of the common problems in many CS-based radars and overcome disadvantages of the conventional Nyquist processing, i.e. matched filtering in high resolution radar systems. The proposed method allows us to design sub-Nyquist radars, which require less than 2% of Nyquist samples and recover targets without resolution degradation in comparison to the conventional Nyquist processing.