Performances Analysis of Coherently Integrated CPF for LFM Signal under Low SNR and Its Application to Ground Moving Target Imaging

The detection and parameters estimation of linear frequency-modulated (LFM) signal are important for modern radar applications, but they are also challenged by the fact that echo signal is often of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to reasons of long imaging distance and/or limited transmitted power, and the target of small size and/or hidden characteristics. To enhance the SNR, in our previous work, a novel coherently integrated cubic phase function (CICPF) was recently developed for the parameters estimation of the multicomponent LFM signal. In the CICPF, the auto-terms are coherently integrated to enhance the performance in the case of low SNR and also to suppress the cross-terms and spurious peaks. In this paper, as an extension of our previous work, the theoretical performance analyses including several important properties and the fast implementation are provided. Furthermore, the asymptotic mean squared error of a CICPF-based estimator as well as the output SNR of a CICPF-based detector are theoretically derived in closed-forms. From the performance point of view, the proposed CICPF attains the Cramer-Rao bound at low input SNR. The complexity analysis also indicates that the CICPF with the nonuniform fast Fourier transform is computationally efficient without needing the interpolation operation and parameter search. Numerical studies of the CICPF confirm the theoretical analysis and demonstrate superior performance of the proposed approach compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, especially under the low-SNR condition. Finally, the proposed CICPF is applied for the ground moving target imaging in synthetic aperture radar. Results using simulated and experimental data demonstrate that it provides an effective means to obtain well-focused image for ground moving targets.