Bio-inspired processing of radar target echoes

Krasin Georgiev, Alessio Balleri, Andy Stove, Marc W. Holderied
2018 IET radar, sonar & navigation  
Echolocating bats have evolved the ability to detect, resolve and discriminate targets in highly challenging environments using biological sonar. The way bats process signals in the receiving auditory system is not the same as that of radar and sonar and hence investigating differences and similarities might provide useful lessons to improve synthetic sensors. The Spectrogram Correlation And Transformation (SCAT) receiver is an existing model of the bat auditory system that takes into account
more » ... e physiology and the neural organisation of bats that emit broadband signals. In this study, the authors present a baseband receiver equivalent to the SCAT that allows an analysis of target echoes at baseband. The baseband SCAT (BSCT) is used to investigate the output of the bat-auditory model for two closely spaced scatterers and to carry out an analysis of range resolution performance and a comparison with the conventional matched filter. Results firstly show that the BSCT provides improved resolution performance. It is then demonstrated that the output of the BSCT can be obtained with an equivalent matched-filter based receiver. The results are verified with a set of laboratory experiments at radio frequencies in a high signalto-noise ratio. Fig. 8 Estimated spacing as a function of the normalised spacing between the scatterers. The signal is a linear chirp with bandwidth 4 GHz and the SNR is ∼30 dB. The nominal resolution limit is shown as dotted line. The dashed lines are positioned at normalised spacings 0.8 and 1.43. The physical target consists of two vertical rods on a turntable (a) Simulated target (b) Vertical rods
doi:10.1049/iet-rsn.2018.5241 fatcat:cvq2n46rbfbqhliw4d53ta63pm