Compressed Sensing-Based Range-Doppler Processing Method for Passive Radar

Passive radar (PR) systems use the existing transmitters of opportunity in the environment to perform tasks such as detection, tracking, and imaging. The classical cross-correlation based methods to obtain the range-Doppler map have the problems of high sidelobe and limited resolution due to the influence of signal bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel range-Doppler processing method based on compressed sensing (CS), which performs sparse reconstruction in range and Doppler dimensions to achieve high resolution and reduces sidelobe without excessive computational burden. Results from numerical simulations and experimental measurements recorded with the Chinese standard digital television terrestrial broadcasting (DTTB) based PR show that the proposed method successfully handles the range-Doppler map formatting problem for PR and outperforms the existing CS-based PR processing methods.