Target Altitude Estimation in Over-the-Horizon Radar

Abstract

Doppler signatures of local multipath signals provide useful information for target altitude estimation in over-the-horizon radar surveillance. In this paper, we develop a method to improve the resolution of these multipath Doppler signatures and enable enhanced altitude estimation of aircraft target which maintains a constant altitude. Moreover, we consider the impact of ionospheric layer motion on target parameter estimation and show that target parameters can be estimated under both stationary as well as time-varying ionospheric layer conditions. In order to improve the resolution and estimation accuracy of the target parameters and ionosphere velocity with a significantly reduced complexity, we exploit a frequency focused transform to the de-chirped target signals for dimension reduction before applying a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO)-based high-resolution spectrum estimation technique. The proposed strategy outperforms fractional Fourier transform and classical subspace-based frequency estimation methods with a much lower computational complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is especially evident for challenging cases where the multipath signal components have spectrally close Doppler signatures. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.