Main-beam multi-target monopulse super-resolution

Current monopulse radar does not resolve multiple sources within the main beam, a scenario that arises in a number of radar applications such as: ballistic missile defense, where the incoming missile complex consists of a large number of objects; air defense, where a detection may correspond to one or multiple targets; cruise missile defense for low angle target tracking in multipath; etc. This paper describes a super-resolution procedure designed for radar and EW applications requiring resolving multiple targets within the main beam given a single snapshot of array data. Our procedure enables the practical implementation of such super-resolution process by first forming multiple receive beams to provide data and degree-of-freedom reductions without significant information loss. Super-resolution is then achieved by applying matrix techniques to the beamspace data. The overall approach can be interpreted in terms of projecting sensor data into a compressed "information domain". In our particular application this results in a generalization of the monopulse processing scheme to the main-beam multi-target case.