MLE for moving target’s profile stitching in SFR

In stepped-frequency imaging radar, stitching the high range resolution profiles of different sampling intervals is very important to obtain the whole profile of the range gate. Current stitching methods usually operate under the assumption of over sampling and low target-to-radar velocity to avoid profile distortion. Therefore, these methods are under critical challenges in application. This paper proposes a new stitching method based on phase compensation and maximum likelihood estimation. It generally satisfies the imaging requirement under lower sampling rate and higher velocity conditions with less profile distortion. It is shown that the performance of this method can reach Cramer-Rao low bound under stationary Gaussian noise. Performances of several methods are compared by theoretical analysis and simulations. The results verify the advantages of the method proposed in this paper.