On radar detection of chirp signals with nondeterministic parameters in challenging noise background

Chirp signals arise in many applications of signal processing. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting chirp signals that are encountered in a bistatic radar which we are developing for remote sensing of cosmic ray induced air showers. The received echoes from the air showers are wideband (several megahertz) and characterized by very short sweep periods (few microseconds). Furthermore, their corresponding parameters are variable within some expected ranges, which makes our detection problem a challenging one. The primary focus of this research is to address these challenges and find an optimized detection approach under the existing receiver environment which contains different spurious noises and non-stationary sources. We propose a detection algorithm based on Hough transform for detecting our radar received echoes and we compare the resulting performance to the conventional likelihood-ratio test (LRT) detector. In this context, detection performance is evaluated based on real experimental data.