Efficient Acquisition Method for Maneuvering Target in Pseudorandom Code Phase Modulated Radar

Aiming at solving the problem of detecting far-field and maneuvering targets, this paper proposes an efficient acquisition method based on pseudorandom code with residual carrier for the pseudorandom code phase modulated radar. By modifying the pseudorandom code structure, there is a direct current (DC) component in the pseudorandom code phase modulated waveform. Then, Fourier transform (FT) is employed to estimate the Doppler frequency from the residual carrier in the received signal. After compensating the code phase drift via the estimated Doppler frequency, the target's energy can be effectively accumulated on the code phase – Doppler frequency plane by using the circular correlation and FT. The proposed method effectively resolves the loss of integration efficiency induced by autocorrelation-loss and code phase drift of the maneuvering target, and thus greatly improves the detection performance and parameter estimation accuracy. Compared with the partial matched filtering - fast Fourier transform (PMF-FFT) Keystone Transform (KT) and the radon Fourier transform (RFT), the proposed method significantly reduces the computational cost and decreases the computation time on the premise of retaining high-precision estimations of target parameters. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.