A Novel Detection Method of Unmodulated Radar Pulses in Scenarios with Interference for Digital Wideband ESM Receivers
Aline de Oliveira, Jorge Pires · European Radar Conference · 2019
In this paper, we present a novel detection method of unmodulated radar pulses oriented to digital wideband Electronic Support Measures (ESM) applications for Electronic Warfare (EW). This novel method reduces the false alarm probability in the presence of interference signals as spurious or jammers. Since ESM receivers have no a priori knowledge about hostile’s electromagnetic emissions, the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) for sinusoidal pulses with unknown phase, frequency, amplitude and time of arrival (TOA) becomes a powerful detection method for digital ESM applications. But, unfortunately, this method is not robust to spurious signals, which increase the probability of false alarm to non-operational values and cause degradation of detection performance. We propose a combination of the GLRT with a validation process, which is based on the L-out-of-N logic applied to the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), which is the GLRT test statistic. Simulation results show significant reduction of the false alarm probability in the presence of interference while keeping operational detection performance.