Pseudo-spectrum based track-before-detect for bistatic radar network

doi:10.23919/JSEE.2025.000046

Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2026, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (1): 127-136.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2025.000046

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Pseudo-spectrum based track-before-detect for bistatic radar network

Tao HAN¹^,²(), Gongjian ZHOU¹^,*()

¹School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
²Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing 211111, China

Received:2024-08-02 Accepted:2025-03-13 Online:2026-02-18 Published:2026-03-09
Contact: Gongjian ZHOU E-mail:hantao@hit.edu.cn;zhougj@hit.edu.cn
About author:
HAN Tao was born in 1995. She received her B.S. degree in electronic information engineering in 2016 from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), Weihai, China, M.S. degree in software engineering in 2018 from Harbin Engineering University (HEU), Harbin, China, and Ph.D. degree in information and communication engineering from HIT, Harbin, China, in 2024. She is now with the Purple Mountain Laboratories, China. Her current research interests include the field of target tracking and radar signal processing. E-mail: hantao@hit.edu.cn

ZHOU Gongjian was born in 1979. He received his B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in information and communication engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2000, 2002, and 2008, respectively. From February 2009 to March 2011, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology. From April 2011 to May 2012, he was a visiting professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. He is currently a professor with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology. His research interests include estimation, tracking, detection, information fusion, and signal processing. E-mail: zhougj@hit.edu.cn
Supported by:
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62371155) and the Heilongjiang Outstanding Youth Science Fund (JQ2022F002).

Abstract

Abstract:

This paper addresses weak target detection problem for bistatic radar via a pseudo-spectrum (PS) based track-before- detect (TBD). Generally, PS-TBD estimates target position and velocity by means of pseudo-spectrum construction in the discrete measurement space and accurate energy accumulation in mixed coordinates. However, the grids within the polar sensing region of the receivers in the bistatic radar are not aligned. Traditional PS-TBD can not directly process these measurements. In this paper, a PS-TBD method for bistatic radar is proposed to overcome this problem. Each cell in the measurement space of the receivers is mapped to the aligned Cartesian coordinates and predicted to the integration frame according to the assumed filter velocity. A PS is formulated centered on the predicted Cartesian position. Then the samples of the pseudo-spectra are accumulated to the nearest cell around the predicted Cartesian position. The procedure of the energy integration is derived in detail. Simulation results validate the efficacy of the proposed method in terms of detection accuracy and parameter estimation.

Key words: bistatic radar, track-before-detect (TBD), weak target detection, pseudo-spectrum (PS)

Tao HAN, Gongjian ZHOU. Pseudo-spectrum based track-before-detect for bistatic radar network[J]. Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics, 2026, 37(1): 127-136.

Figures/Tables 12

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References 30

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Pseudo-spectrum based track-before-detect for bistatic radar network

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