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Time-frequency tomographic imaging of a rotating object in a narrow-band radar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2016

Ewa Swiercz*
Affiliation:
Bialystok University of Technology, Wiejska 45 A, 15-351 Bialystok, Poland. Phone: +48 85 467 9441
*
Corresponding author:E. Swiercz, Email: e.swiercz@pb.edu.pl
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Abstract

The backscatter from radar object carries Doppler information of scatterers on the object determined by the radial velocity of scattering points and the radar transmitted frequency. For a rotating object this information is contained in the frequency characteristics over varying aspect angle. Frequency characteristics are used to create projections for Doppler radar tomographic imaging. This paper presents a method for high resolution imaging of a rotating target using a time-frequency transform of a returned signal as tomographic projections. The resolution of a tomographic image depends not only on radar system parameters but also depends on the resolution of input projections. The reassigned spectrogram is proposed for building of tomographic projections, due to its possibility of squeezing of frequency spread. The reassigned spectrogram is sensitive to noise so the denoising procedure in the time-frequency domain must be performed before the reassignment procedure. The denoising is performed by removing Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) noise coefficients below the appropriate threshold. The STFT is a linear time-frequency transform and coefficients, which belong to the signal and coefficients which belong to noise can be analyzed separately. The efficiency of the proposed idea of imaging is supported by results of numerical experiments.

Information

Type
Research Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and the European Microwave Association 2016 
Figure 0

Fig. 1. The geometry of the rotating point target.

Figure 1

Fig. 2. (a) The spectrogram of scatterers located at (30, 30) and (−30, −30), (b) the reassigned spectrogram of scatterers located at (30, 30) and (−30, −30), and (c) the tomographic image (zoomed) based on the reassigned spectrogram of scatterers located at (30, 30) and (−30, −30).

Figure 2

Fig. 3. (a) The spectrogram of scatterers at (10, 10) and (30, 30), (b) the reassigned spectrogram of scatterers at (10, 10) and (30, 30), and (c) the tomographic image (zoomed) from the reassigned spectrogram of scatterers at (10, 10) and (30, 30) with enhanced directional properties of the PSF.

Figure 3

Fig. 4. (a) The spectrogram of scatterers located at (10, 10) and (70, 70), (b) the reassigned spectrogram of scatterers located at (10, 10) and (70, 70), and (c) the tomographic image (zoomed) from the reassigned spectrogram of scatterers located at (10, 10) and (70, 70).

Figure 4

Fig. 5. Slice through the column with the maximal peak in the imaging matrix (a) of the normalized PSF for the point at (10, 10), (b) of the normalized magnitude of the PSF (in dB) for the point at (10, 10), and (c) of the normalized magnitude of the PSF (in dB) for the point at (70, 70).

Figure 5

Fig. 6. The reassigned spectrogram (a) of two points located too closely: at (10, 10) and (15, 15), (b) of two points located too far: at (10, 10) and (150, 150), in experiments with ambiguity of Doppler frequencies, and (c) of two points located properly for the effective imaging process.

Figure 6

Fig. 7. (a) The modulus of the STFT for the signal with SNR = 4.1536 dB, (b) the reassigned spectrogram after 17 recursions, and (c) the denoising result after 17 recursion.

Figure 7

Fig. 8. Imaging results of the tomographic imaging (a) for the SNR = 4.1536 dB, (b) for the SNR = 1.6548 dB, and (c) for the SNR = −0.2834 dB.