An Efficient Processing Architecture for Range Profiling Using Noise Radar Technology

The importance of high resolution range profiles (HRRPs) for radar applications like tracking or classification is well known. In the scientific literature several approaches have been investigated to obtain HRRPs from wideband radar signals. Recent works show that noise radar waveforms can be exploited in this sense due to their high resolution and low peak to sidelobe ratio (PSLR) properties. However their use can cause some issues in applications where long time integrations are required, e.g., in the presence of a low effective radiated power (ERP) transmitter: recording the reference signal in this case would be difficult due to the big quantity of data. This work proposes a real time digital processing schematic based on linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) which is very flexible and has a low computational burden: its internal state can be easily controlled and reproduced in reception, where a multichannel correlator is exploited as matched filter. The resulting signal, compared to typical “pulse compression” and noise radar waveforms, shows similar performances but a lower order of complexity in terms of real time generation and reception.