Fast method for radar maneuvering target detection and motion parameter estimation

The detection of maneuvering targets is a challenging task for radar. There are the first-order range migration (FRM), second-order range migration (SRM) and third-order range migration (TRM) which respectively caused by the velocity, acceleration and jerk of the target, and they will affect the performance of energy accumulation. In order to resolve the problem, the third-order keystone transform (TOKT) is employed to correct TRM in this paper, then FRM and SRM are removed simultaneously through frequency shift and cross correlation. After RM correction, the velocity and acceleration are estimated via Lv’s distribution (LVD). Finally, the jerk is estimated through a searching procedure. Compared with some existing methods, the proposed method has a better integration performance and a lower computational cost, and can be applied to estimate the motion parameters of multi-targets. Several simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.