Research of a Radar Imaging Algorithm Based on High Pulse Repetition Random Frequency Hopping Synthetic Wideband Waveform

Aiming at the imaging algorithm of high-pulse-repetition random-frequency-hopping synthetic wideband radar on a supersonic/hypersonic aircraft platform, this study established an echo simulation model of target and clutter, analyzed the special range-Doppler coupling effect and its influence on imaging, and proposes a method of imaging with pipeline-parallel processing based on generalized 2D matched-filtering and Doppler pre-processing. In the method, Doppler-beam-sharpening was advanced to be performed with the pulse compression process in each frame, and the special range-Doppler coupling effect caused by high dynamic motion of platform and random frequency hopping in bandwidth synthesis was well suppressed; several modes of random frequency hopping were designed and the pipeline-parallel image processing algorithm was optimized for each mode. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed imaging method can effectively avoid the divergence of 2D range-Doppler images in the range direction, and can meet the requirements of real-time imaging.