Space-time Radon-Fourier transform and applications in radar target detection

This study proposes the Space-time Radon-Fourier transform (STRFT) for wideband digital array radar (DAR). It is a novel coherent detection technique that jointly realise wideband digital beamforming (DBF), range compression and long-time coherent integration. The likelihood ratio detector (LRT) is first derived based on the three-dimensional (3D) signal model of moving targets, which is the output of the STRFT on the 3D range-compressed echoes. Some transform properties of the proposed STRFT are also discussed. This include the 3D impulse response, 3D translational invariance, multi-target linear additivity, linear SNR gain in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), as well as the 3D correlation function of transformed AWGN. Also, the fast implementation of STRFT is proposed in the element-pulse-range frequency domain, which is realised via the two dimensional Chirp-Z transform (CZT) based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) operators. The proposed method may remarkably reduce the computational burden for modern wideband DAR. Finally, some numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.