Digital signal processing for doppler radar signals

In a pulsed-doppler radar system the return signal is naturally viewed as a sequence of samples of one or more complex sinusoids plus noise. We have studied several digital processing techniques for estimating a short-time spectral representation of such signals as well as digital techniques for estimating the frequency of a single dominant spectral component. Techniques considered include: (1) Discrete short-time Fourier analysis followed by peak-picking and median smoothing to remove errors. (2) Short-time maximum entropy spectrum estimation incorporating adaptive noise suppression. (3) A new recursive algorithm based on recursive computation of the short-time auto-correlation function. The relative merits of each technique are discussed and examples of performance are given.