Self-adaptive microwave photonics time-frequency signal processing for high-power interference suppression

Radar has become a widely adopted technology in intelligent transportation systems for environmental sensing. However, the exponential increase in the number and functionality of radars, combined with the dynamic traffic scenarios, made the radar's operating scenarios complex and variable, imposing significant challenges on the radar's operation. In this paper, we propose a stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) based self-adaptive time-frequency signal processing (TFSP) method for dynamic interference scenarios, which can adapt to suppress the high-power interference and enhance the operation performance of radar systems. Unlike current SBS-based microwave photonics technology, this approach exploits the time-frequency characteristic of the chirped optical signal when SBS occurs to achieve two-dimensional self-adaptive suppression for the high-power non-stationary optical signal. Based on this advantage, we develop an interference suppression method for wideband radar, which is transparent to the time-frequency characteristic of the high-power interference, realizing real-time suppression and self-adaptability for different types of interferences in dynamic interference scenarios. Experimentally, we first demonstrate the suppression effect of the proposed TFSP on different types of interference and the performance improvement on radar detection with a maximum signal-to-noise enhancement of 25.68 dB. Then, the self-adaptability of the TFSP to the dynamic interference scenarios is also verified when the interferences change.