Nonlinear Suppression of Range Ambiguity in Pulse Doppler Radar

Coherent pulse train processing is most commonly used in airborne pulse Doppler radar, achieving adequate transmitter/receiver isolation and excellent resolution properties while inherently inducing ambiguities in Doppler and range. First introduced by Palermo in 1962 using two conjugate LFM pulses, the primary nonlinear suppression objective involves reducing range ambiguity, given the waveform is nominally unambiguous in Doppler, by using interpulse and intrapulse coding (pulse compression) to discriminate received ambiguous pulse responses. By introducing a nonlinear operation on compressed (undesired) pulse responses within individual channels, ambiguous energy levels are reduced in channel outputs. This research expands the NLS concept using discrete coding and processing. A general theory is developed showing how NLS accomplishes ambiguity surface volume removal without requiring orthogonal coding. Useful NLS code sets are generated using combinatorial, simulated annealing optimization techniques - a general algorithm is developed to extended family size, code length, and number of phases (polyphase coding). An adaptive reserved code thresholding scheme is introduced to efficiently and effectively track the matched filter response of a target field over a wide dynamic range, such as normally experienced in airborne radar systems. An evaluation model for characterizing NLS clutter suppression performance is developed - NLS performance is characterized using measured clutter data with analysis indicating the proposed technique performs relatively well even when large clutter cells exist

Induction machine faults detection using stator current parametric spectral estimation

International audienceCurrent spectrum analysis is a proven technique for fault diagnosis in electrical machines. Current spectral estimation is usually performed using classical techniques such as periodogram (FFT) or its extensions. However, these techniques have several drawbacks since their frequency resolution is limited and additional post-processing algorithms are required to extract a relevant fault detection criterion. Therefore, this paper proposes a new parametric spectral estimator that fully exploits the faults sensitive frequencies. The proposed technique is based on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and offers high-resolution capabilities. Based on this approach, a fault criterion is derived for detecting several fault types.The proposed technique is assessed using simulation signals, issued from a coupled electromagnetic circuits approach-based simulation tool for mechanical unbalance and electrical asymmetry faults detection. It is afterward validated using experiments on a 0.75-kW induction machine test bed for the particular case of bearing faults

Waveform-Diverse Stretch Processing

Stretch processing with the use of a wideband LFM transmit waveform is a commonly used technique, and its popularity is in large part due to the large time-bandwidth product that provides fine range resolution capabilities for applications that require it. It allows pulse compression of echoes at a much lower sampling bandwidth without sacrificing any range resolution. Previously, this technique has been restrictive in terms of waveform diversity because the literature shows that the LFM is the only type of waveform that will result in a tone after stretch processing. However, there are also many examples in the literature that demonstrate an ability to compensate for distortions from an ideal LFM waveform structure caused by various hardware components in the transmitter and receiver. This idea of compensating for variations is borrowed here, and the use of nonlinear FM (NLFM) waveforms is proposed to facilitate more variety in wideband waveforms that are usable with stretch processing. A compensation transform that permits the use of these proposed NLFM waveforms replaces the final fast Fourier transform (FFT) stage of the stretch processing configuration, but the rest of the RF receive chain remains the same. This modification to the receive processing structure makes possible the use of waveform diversity for legacy radar systems that already employ stretch processing. Similarly, using the same concept of compensating for distortions to the LFM structure along with the notion that a Fourier transform is essentially the matched filter bank for an LFM waveform mixed with an LFM reference, a least-squares based mismatched filtering (MMF) scheme is proposed. This MMF could likewise be used to replace thefinal FFT stage, and can also facilitate the application of NLFM waveforms to legacy radar systems. The efficacy of these filtering approaches (compensation transform and least-squares based MMF) are demonstrated in simulation and experimentally using open-air measurements and are applied to different scenarios of NLFM waveform to assess the results and provide a means of comparison between the two techniques

Antenna Design and Signal Processing for Mechanical FMCW Coastal Surveillance Radar Systems

The demand for highly sophisticated radar systems to be implemented along the coastal waters of the Strait of Malacca for the surveillance and tracking of vessels that travels through this narrow Strait has risen rapidly over the last few decades. Along with the technological advancements in radar systems, the increased demand is in response to the success that radars have introduced in significantly reducing some of the biggest problems contributed from security and weather condition perspectives. The existing radars implemented by Indonesian authorities to fulfil the surveillance requirements of the Strait mainly comprises of electronic scanning systems. Nonetheless, several allocated radar sites along the Strait inevitably lacks the basic infrastructure and accessibility required to install more complex systems (i.e. electronic scanning radars) that are prone to higher maintenance. This have favoured authorities to opt for the use of mechanical scanning radars, which, unlike phased array systems, are simpler, less complex, and significantly more affordable systems. The resolution performance alongside the accuracy of the positional information of a detected target provided by the radar is highly dependent on the angular resolution of the antenna. For mechanically scanning radars, a highly directional beam is commonly produced by employing conventional parabolic reflector antennas. Reflector antennas are a popular choice for surveillance and tracking applications as it is known for producing beams with very high gain and narrow beamwidths in both planes. However, this is usually achieved by employing an undesirably large reflector, which tends to significantly increase the cost of the radar system, and most importantly its size and weight, which is critical especially for applications that highly values compact and mobile systems. To overcome this issue faced in many similar situations, several angle measurement techniques have been introduced to improve the detection performance of radars without increasing the physical size of the antenna, with the most notable and highly successful one being monopulse technique. This research project proposes a model of a reflector antenna design for a mechanical scanning radar that is suitable to provide coastal surveillance and monitoring of vessels and low flying objects. The objective of the antenna design is to significantly improve the resolution and accuracy for target detection without utilizing a larger dish, but instead through the implementation of amplitude monopulse and a novel post-detection processing technique that allows for the design of a more compact and cost-effective antenna system. The proposed reflector antenna system that achieves these objectives comprises of a dual-horn feed and a vertically truncated reflector of an optimal aperture shape and dimension to create a pair of simultaneous overlapping fan-shaped beams that is narrow in azimuth and several times wider in elevation. The design of the monopulse feed is modelled and simulated on a CEM tool (CST) to evaluate the monopulse patterns produced in the horizontal plane of the radar, which are optimized towards the requirements of the application. In addition, this thesis introduces a novel post-detection signal processing technique that uses priori information of the antenna response pattern to offer a substantial enhancement on the resolution and clutter resilience of any new or existing radar antenna system at a very low cost, which is especially likely to make a significant contribution to the safety at sea. In addition to limiting the size of the antenna as much as possible while fulfilling the requirements of the application in hand, employing the proposed antenna system along the coastal shores of the Strait of Malacca would largely prioritize on keeping the effective weight and cost of the antenna to a minimum. This is achieved by manufacturing the reflector through 3D printing technology and coating its surface with a copper compound spray to achieve the properties of a metal. A prototype of the reflector antenna is manufactured accordingly using the proposed method of fabrication in order to provide an assessment of the practical antenna performance. The radiation properties of the antenna pattern are measured in an outdoor range test facility, and the measurement results allows for an accurate validation of the electromagnetic (EM) simulations of the corresponding antenna design obtained on CST. Finally, in order to assess the enhancing effect of the proposed signal processing technique on the resolution performance of an existing antenna, MATLAB based codes have been developed to demonstrate the technique on several simulated far-field patterns of antennas with common line source distributions before it is applied on the sum pattern output of the monopulse antenna designed in this project

Advanced VLBI Imaging

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is an observational technique developed in astronomy for combining multiple radio telescopes into a single virtual instrument with an effective aperture reaching up to many thousand kilometers and enabling measurements at highest angular resolutions. The celebrated examples of applying VLBI to astrophysical studies include detailed, high-resolution images of the innermost parts of relativistic outflows (jets) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) and recent pioneering observations of the shadows of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the center of our Galaxy and in the galaxy M87. Despite these and many other proven successes of VLBI, analysis and imaging of VLBI data still remain difficult, owing in part to the fact that VLBI imaging inherently constitutes an ill-posed inverse problem. Historically, this problem has been addressed in radio interferometry by the CLEAN algorithm, a matching-pursuit inverse modeling method developed in the early 1970-s and since then established as a de-facto standard approach for imaging VLBI data. In recent years, the constantly increasing demand for improving quality and fidelity of interferometric image reconstruction has resulted in several attempts to employ new approaches, such as forward modeling and Bayesian estimation, for application to VLBI imaging. While the current state-of-the-art forward modeling and Bayesian techniques may outperform CLEAN in terms of accuracy, resolution, robustness, and adaptability, they also tend to require more complex structure and longer computation times, and rely on extensive finetuning of a larger number of non-trivial hyperparameters. This leaves an ample room for further searches for potentially more effective imaging approaches and provides the main motivation for this dissertation and its particular focusing on the need to unify algorithmic frameworks and to study VLBI imaging from the perspective of inverse problems in general. In pursuit of this goal, and based on an extensive qualitative comparison of the existing methods, this dissertation comprises the development, testing, and first implementations of two novel concepts for improved interferometric image reconstruction. The concepts combine the known benefits of current forward modeling techniques, develop more automatic and less supervised algorithms for image reconstruction, and realize them within two different frameworks. The first framework unites multiscale imaging algorithms in the spirit of compressive sensing with a dictionary adapted to the uv-coverage and its defects (DoG-HiT, DoB-CLEAN). We extend this approach to dynamical imaging and polarimetric imaging. The core components of this framework are realized in a multidisciplinary and multipurpose software MrBeam, developed as part of this dissertation. The second framework employs a multiobjective genetic evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) for the purpose of achieving fully unsupervised image reconstruction and hyperparameter optimization. These new methods are shown to outperform the existing methods in various metrics such as angular resolution, structural sensitivity, and degree of supervision. We demonstrate the great potential of these new techniques with selected applications to frontline VLBI observations of AGN jets and SMBH. In addition to improving the quality and robustness of image reconstruction, DoG-HiT, DoB-CLEAN and MOEA/D also provide such novel capabilities as dynamic reconstruction of polarimetric images on minute time-scales, or near-real time and unsupervised data analysis (useful in particular for application to large imaging surveys). The techniques and software developed in this dissertation are of interest for a wider range of inverse problems as well. This includes such versatile fields such as Ly-alpha tomography (where we improve estimates of the thermal state of the intergalactic medium), the cosmographic search for dark matter (where we improve forecasted bounds on ultralight dilatons), medical imaging, and solar spectroscopy

Adaptive Illumination Patterns for Radar Applications

The fundamental goal of Fully Adaptive Radar (FAR) involves full exploitation of the joint, synergistic adaptivity of the radar\u27s transmitter and receiver. Little work has been done to exploit the joint space time Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF) available via an Active Electronically Steered Array (AESA) during the radar\u27s transmit illumination cycle. This research introduces Adaptive Illumination Patterns (AIP) as a means for exploiting this previously untapped transmit DOF. This research investigates ways to mitigate clutter interference effects by adapting the illumination pattern on transmit. Two types of illumination pattern adaptivity were explored, termed Space Time Illumination Patterns (STIP) and Scene Adaptive Illumination Patterns (SAIP). Using clairvoyant knowledge, STIP demonstrates the ability to remove sidelobe clutter at user specified Doppler frequencies, resulting in optimum receiver performance using a non-adaptive receive processor. Using available database knowledge, SAIP demonstrated the ability to reduce training data heterogeneity in dense target environments, thereby greatly improving the minimum discernable velocity achieved through STAP processing

In pursuit of high resolution radar using pursuit algorithms

Radar receivers typically employ matched filters designed to maximize signal to noise ratio (SNR) in a single target environment. In a multi-target environment, however, matched filter estimates of target environment often consist of spurious targets because of radar signal sidelobes. As a result, matched filters are not suitable for use in high resolution radars operating in multi-target environments. Assuming a point target model, we show that the radar problem can be formulated as a linear under-determined system with a sparse solution. This suggests that radar can be considered as a sparse signal recovery problem. However, it is shown that the sensing matrix obtained using common radar signals does not usually satisfy the mutual coherence condition. This implies that using recovery techniques available in compressed sensing literature may not result in the optimal solution. In this thesis, we focus on the greedy algorithm approach to solve the problem and show that it naturally yields a quantitative measure for radar resolution. In addition, we show that the limitations of the greedy algorithms can be attributed to the close relation between greedy matching pursuit algorithms and the matched filter. This suggests that improvements to the resolution capability of the greedy pursuit algorithms can be made by using a mismatched signal dictionary. In some cases, unlike the mismatched filter, the proposed mismatched pursuit algorithm is shown to offer improved resolution and stability without any noticeable difference in detection performance. Further improvements in resolution are proposed by using greedy algorithms in a radar system using multiple transmit waveforms. It is shown that while using the greedy algorithms together with linear channel combining can yield significant resolution improvement, a greedy approach using nonlinear channel combining also shows some promise. Finally, a forward-backward greedy algorithm is proposed for target environments comprising of point targets as well as extended targets

A scalable real-time processing chain for radar exploiting illuminators of opportunity

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis details the design of a processing chain and system software for a commensal radar system, that is, a radar that makes use of illuminators of opportunity to provide the transmitted waveform. The stages of data acquisition from receiver back-end, direct path interference and clutter suppression, range/Doppler processing and target detection are described and targeted to general purpose commercial off-the-shelf computing hardware. A detailed low level design of such a processing chain for commensal radar which includes both processing stages and processing stage interactions has, to date, not been presented in the Literature. Furthermore, a novel deployment configuration for a networked multi-site FM broadcast band commensal radar system is presented in which the reference and surveillance channels are record at separate locations