COMPRESSED SENSING BASED TRACK BEFORE DETECT ALGORITHM FOR AIRBORNE RADARS

This paper presents a novel compressed sensing based track before detect (CS-TBD) algorithm. The proposed algorithm reconstructs the whole radar scenario (direction of arrival (DOA)-Doppler plane) for each range gate at consecutive scans using an improved stagewise orthogonal matching pursuit (StOMP) algorithm, resulting in a three-dimensional range-DOA-Doppler space. It then performs temporal tracking in the newly built three-dimensional range-DOA-Doppler space, based on the information from multiple illuminations during each scan, as well as among consecutive scans. In the proposed CS-TBD algorithm, the improved StOMP algorithm together with the temporal tracking, can effectively distinguish true targets from false targets and clutter based on information from multiple illuminations.