HMM based track-before-detect strategy for FMCW/CW emitter detection

Detection of FMCW/CW (Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave / Continuous Wave) radars is a critical problem for applying electronic counter measures. Since these radars use continuous waves with very low amplitude levels, their detection is very difficult. In this work, a new HMM (Hidden Markov Model) based track-before-detect type iterative method for detection of FMCW/CWradars is proposed. In each iteration, instantaneous frequency of one single emitter is tracked and detection is performed based on the success of the track. Conducted experiments show that, proposed method can successfully identify FMCW/CWemitters in very low (-15dB) signal-to-noise ratios.