Joint parameter estimation method for multiple manoeuvring targets with high speed

In this study, a joint parameter estimation method is proposed to realise the long-time coherent integration and estimate the motion parameters for multiple weak manoeuvring targets with high speed and acceleration, involving the firstorder range migration (FRM), second-order RM (SRM) and Doppler frequency migration. In the proposed method, the effect of the target's Doppler spectrum spanning over two neighbouring pulse repetition frequency bounds on first-order keystone transform (FKT) is first analysed and a Doppler shifting function is constructed to solve this problem. Then, FKT and the velocity ambiguity factor searching are performed to eliminate the FRM. After that, SRM is removed through the phase compensation function related to acceleration. Finally, the Lv's distribution is applied to realise the coherent integration and obtain the estimates of velocity and acceleration. The numerical experiments using both simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve close detection and estimation performance with much lower computational complexity, compared with the generalised radon-Fourier transform. Moreover, it can estimate the motion parameters of the targets without knowing any prior knowledge of targets and obtain good coherent integration performance in low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios.