The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Space-time reduced rank methods and CFAR signal detection algorithms with applications to HPRF radar
Author:	Ayoub, Tareq F.
View Online:	njit-etd1998-037 (xi, 109 pages ~ 5.1 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Degree:	Doctor of Philosophy
Program:	Electrical Engineering
Document Type:	Dissertation
Advisory Committee:	Haimovich, Alexander (Committee chair) Bar-Ness, Yeheskel (Committee member) Reisman, Stanley S. (Committee member) Michalopoulou, Eliza Zoi-Heleni (Committee member) Wang, Hung (Committee member)
Date:	1998-05
Keywords:	Radar. Adaptive signal processing. Adaptive antennas.
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	In radar applications, the statistical properties (covariance matrix) of the interference are typically unknown a priori and are estimated from a dataset with limited sample support. Often, the limited sample support leads to numerically ill-conditioned radar detectors. Under such circumstances, classical interference cancellation methods such as sample matrix inversion (SMI) do not perform satisfactorily. In these cases, innovative reduced-rank space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques outperform full-rank techniques. The high pulse repetition frequency (HPRF) radar problem is analyzed and it is shown that it is in the class of adaptive radar with limited sample support. Reduced-rank methods are studied for the HPRF radar problem. In particular, the method known as diagonally loaded covariance matrix SMI (L-SMI) is closely investigated. Diagonal loading improves the numerical conditioning of the estimated covariance matrix, and hence, is well suited to be applied in a limited sample support environment. The performance of L-SMI is obtained through a theoretical distribution of the output conditioned signal-to-noise ratio of the space-time array. Reduced-rank techniques are extended to constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). Two new modified CFAR GLRT detectors are considered and analyzed. The first is a subspace-based GLRT detector where subspace-based transformations are applied to the data prior to detection. A subspace transformation adds statistical stability which tends to improve performance at the expense of an additional SNR loss. The second detector is a modified GLRT detector that incorporates a diagonally loaded covariance matrix. Both detectors show improved performance over the traditional GLRT.