Divergence-based pulse group extracting and inter-pulse modulation parameter estimation of multifunction radar pulse sequences

Currently, multi-function radars (MFRs) are characterized by low probability interception, flexible beam control, and rapidly changing operation modes with pulse groups as basic units, which pose a severe challenge for electronic support (ES) systems to accurately analyzing the MFR pulse sequences. Developing a pulse group extracting and analyzing method that minimizes reliance on prior information and demonstrates high robustness to non-ideal conditions is crucial for further recognition of the MFR operation mode. This article proposes a divergence-based pulse group extracting and inter-pulse modulation parameter estimation of MFR pulse sequences method, i.e., DPEME. It can sequentially perform outlier removal and parameter reconstruction, pulse group extracting, and inter-pulse modulation parameter estimation of non-ideal MFR pulse sequences, which can mitigate the ”batch increase” and ”batch reduction” effects in unsupervised pulse group extracting. The simulation results of non-ideal pulse sequences with six modulation types show that DPEME can achieve superior and more robust unsupervised pulse group extracting performance compared to several existing state-of-the-art methods.