Optimum Subband Filterbank Design for Radar Array Signal Processing with Pulse Compression

Daniel Rabinkin
Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Truong Nguyen
Boston University

A front-end radar array processing system that operates in the subband domain is considered. Each array channel of such a system is individually digitized and subband filtered. The subbands are processed independently and then recombined to perform detection. Processing in the subband domain has been shown to provide significant benefits when compared to conventional wideband processing. These benefits include a major computational reduction in the adaptive processing task; an opcount reduction in the equalizer; and easy parallelization of the entire front-end processing chain that enables an implementation with higher system bandwidth and lower power consumption for a given processor technology.

It is assumed that the pulse compression operation will be performed on radar return signals in the subband domain. A cohesive algorithm is presented that aims to optimize the design of all the filters used in the subbanding process. These include the analysis filter used to decompose the return signals into narrowband components, the synthesis filter used when combining subband components after processing, and the pulse compression generating filter used to generate subband pulse compression filters from a wideband pulse compression filter. The algorithm attempts to minimize system aliasing noise, frequency distortion, and subband processing opcount.

[Back to Session 11] [Back to Technical Program]