Adaptive pulse compression

Abstract

Pulse compression is essentially an estimation procedure in which the complex amplitude for a given range cell is to be estimated while mitigating the interference from neighboring range cells that results from the convolution of the transmitted waveform with the range swath of interest. Traditionally, matched filtering is employed to estimate the range returns whereby the neighboring range cells are suppressed by a fixed amount that is dictated by the range sidelobes of the matched filter. However, matched filtering is a misnomer in that the receive filter is matched only to the transmitted waveform and not to the actual received signal. The paper extends the previously proposed reiterative minimum mean-square error (RMMSE) algorithm for adaptive pulse compression whereby the true matched filter for each individual range cell is estimated based upon the actual received signal resulting in range sidelobes that are adaptively suppressed to the level of the noise floor. The convergence of the RMMSE algorithm is addressed along with the Doppler tolerance.