Sharif Digital Repository

Modern communication and space systems such as satellite communication devices, radars, SAR and radio astronomy interferometers are realized with large antenna arrays since this kind of radiating systems are able to generate radiation patterns with high directivity and resolution. In such a framework, conventional arrays with uniform inter-element spacing could be not satisfactory in terms of costs and dimensions. An interesting alternative is to reduce the array elements obtaining the so called ‘ thinned arrays’. Large thinned arrays have been exploited because of their advantages in terms of weight,consumption, hardware complexity, and cost over the... 

Today, SAR radars are one of the most practical tools for controlling and monitoring surface targets, and so far, several methods have been proposed to create a profile image of the reflection coefficient of surface targets in these Radars. The main problem in these methods is the ability to simultaneously create a reflection coefficient profile image for stationary and moving targets. To create a profile image of the reflection coefficient of moving targets, first it is necessary to detect and estimate its kinetic parameters.This thesis presents a method for detecting and estimating Ground moving targets parameters using Keystone transfer conversion and also presents a method for creating... 

In this dissertation, the application of frequency and space diversities in radar target parameter estimation are investigated. On this basis, multi-frequency signal is used to improve the range resolution, array structure is used to increase the angle estimation accuracy and the merger of the multi-frequency signal and array structure are used to increase the maximum number of targets that can be uniquely identified.Considering the desirable properties of multi-frequency signals such as high bandwidth efficiency, high range resolution achievement without chip length decrease and …, there has been increased interest in the vast area of research on the design of such signals that has... 

Target recognition techniques based on micro Doppler phenomenon are popular because they are applicable even on low resolution radars, in contrast to other techniques such as High Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) which need high resolution in range or angle. Usually, main purpose of such techniques is generating robust features against target initial state, velocity, aspect angle, etc. rather than features which exactly identify a target. Main approaches in the literature are based on time-frequency transforms (TFT) such as spectrogram in order to generate features to classify targets, but in this thesis, we propose a totally different method using Recurrence Plot for generating features... 

Forward scatter radar is a special kind of bistatic radar. It is designed to detect targets near the transmitter-receiver line which is called baseline. It has a number of promising features such as larger target radar cross-section (RCS) than that of traditional radars, applicability of shadow inverse SAR (SISAR) algorithms, high performance in automatic target recognition and identification, and robustness to stealth technology. On the other hand, it also has some inherent limitations, including the absence of range resolution (potentially leading to a high Doppler clutter level) and operation within narrow angles relative to the transmitter-receiver baseline. Target detection in forward... 

By generalizing dictionary learning (DL) algorithms to Multidimensional (MD) mode and using them in applications where signals are inherently multidimensional, such as in three-dimensional (3D) Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) imaging, it is possible to achieve much higher speed and less computational complexity. In this thesis, the formulation of the Multidimensional Dictionary Learning (MDDL) problem is expressed and six algorithms are proposed to solve it. The first one is based on the method of optimum directions (MOD) algorithm for 1D dictionary learning (1DDL), which uses alternating minimization and gradient projection approach. As the MDDL problem is non-convex, the second... 

In this thesis, we investigate the statistical performance of the array processing algorithms. Theoretical performance analysis leads to better methods that outperform the existing algorithms. Besides, analytical performance analysis, results in a more profound understanding of the nature of the considered problem. First of all, problem of covariance matrix estimation, in the non-Gaussian signal case will be investigated. We will focus on a nonparametric estimator which relies on the sign of the data to estimate the covariance matrix on an element-by-element basis. It was known that, sign estimator may give invalid covariance estimates in higher dimensions of the data. We prove this fact in... 

In this project a high spectral purity C-band (4.25-5GHz) frequency synthesizer has been analyzed and designed and implemented in CMOS 0.18μm technology. This synthesizer has been embedded in TX path of a transceiver module as a frequency translator for digital phased array system applications. The system includes Phase Locked Loops (PLLs) and Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDFS). Due to desired Low spur level (90 dBc) in C-band, system level design, frequency plan, choosing proper PLL topology and etc. have been considered in details. One of the important challenges in system design is the signal spectrum purity. In other words, the system should produce minimum phase noise. Output... 

Inspiring by recent developments of Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communications, MIMO radar has been introduced and MIMO radar advantages such as higher degrees of freedom, improved resolution, and improved estimation accuracy are shown. These advantages have drawn attention of many researchers and engineers toward MIMO radar. On this basis, and during the recent years, in many researches, effect of increasing the number of antennas and pulses on the radar performance have been studied. Although MIMO radar has the aforementioned advantages, the hardware costs (due to multiple transmitters and multiple receivers), high energy consumption (multiple pulses), and computational... 

There are a wide variety of radar systems that one of them is MIMO Radars. After a spark in communication in 1998 that developed MIMO communication, recently there has been a great attention towards MIMO radar systems. Researchers have studied this topic from several points of view. Generally, MIMO radar systems are divided into two categories: MIMO radars widely separated antennas and MIMO radars with collocated antennas. One of the important issues of widely separated MIMO radars, is the placement manner of receivers in the geometrical area. This radar’s performance is very dependent to placement of the antennas, because the performance is dependent to relative position of... 

In this thesis, a new passive method suitable for Geolocating LPI radars is introduced. The method uses two Electronic Support (ES) receivers placed on a fast moving platform (e.g., an airplane or a satellite). The proposed method has a high processing gain, which makes it highly suitable for very weak LPI signals. The processing gain of the method was analytically derived and illustrated with simulation to determine if the proposed method can detect LPI radars in much lower SNRs compared to regular time-frequency LPI detection methods. Also, the resolution of the proposed method in both range and cross-range direction in radar location finding was analyzed. Furthurmore, the effect of the... 

Our ultimate goal in this thesis is to design a chaotic receiver for detecting small targets in sea clutter. Sea clutter at low grazing angle has a spiky behavior and in this thesis we desire to model this irregular behavior in the chaos theory frame work. Using a trend similar to statistical detection theory, we will obtain the suboptimal chaotic receiver and investigate the receiver noise effect on the optimality or sub optimality of the detector. Chaotic detector can be used in the coherent and non coherent mode. Although the coherent detector has a superior performance, the efficiency of the non coherent detector is acceptable as well. We will investigate the efficiency of the chaotic... 

In this work, Hough detector has been compared with optimum detectors. We consider 2-D range-time data space, which is constructed by storing the radar returns from different range cells during several successive scans. In this space, target trajectory can be modeled as a straight line for short time intervals, and can be extracted by applying Hough transform transcendentally. In this work, a new detection method based on the likelihood ratio in the data space with Gaussian noise is introduced. ALR and GLR processors have been designed. Then formulas for probability of detection and false alarm rate is calculated, and verified via simulations. A new criterion for estimation quality is... 

The conventional bearing-only tracking solutions are based on Kalman filter. Whenever the problem equations are nonlinear, Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) or more complicated methods are used necessarily. However, EKF suffers of being biased and unstable. Here a new recursive method based on a linear modeling of the problem is proposed, the method does not need an initial guess and outperforms the Kalman filter in the terms of accuracy, complexity and stability. Furthermore, input information needed for the proposed tracking filter is just the observer position, time and value of each angle measurements and the computation load is less than even a simple EKF. mathematical analysis, as well as... 

Accurate modeling of clutter and detection of low observable targets within clutter are the major problems in radar signal processing applications. Recently, fractal geometry is applied to the analysis of high range resolution radar sea clutters. The intrinsic difference in the fractal dimension between sea clutter and the echoes from targets is extracted and used to detect targets. The box-counting method is widely used to estimate fractal dimension but it has some drawbacks never or rarely considered in literature. We explain the drawbacks and propose a new fractal dimension based detector to increase detection performance in comparison with traditional detectors. Both statistically... 

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a microwave imaging radar that achieves high resolution while taking advantage of pulse compression technology and the Doppler effect. In typical radar systems, in order to obtain a good azimuth resolution, one should use an antenna with big aperture. However this is not possible in many cases. SAR has overcome this problem by moving the antenna and so making a synthetic aperture. In inverse SAR (ISAR) the radar antenna is static and synthetic aperture is created by the movement of target. Typical SAR imaging aims at the static targets and when the target is moving, it does not operate well. When detecting moving targets by SAR, both radar and target are... 

Hough transform is frequently used in radar applications. The structure of using this transformation in radars is so that it has been used only in Range radars which transmit short pulses and their primary goal is to make better estimation of the range of the targets. In this work, we introduce the ways in which we can use the Hough transform in Doppler radars which transmit long pulses and their primary goal is to make better estimation of target doppler. We must use Hough transform in time-doppler domain for this class of radars including continuous-wave radars. To prepare this time-doppler domain image some time-frequency transform must be applied to the radar received signal and a part... 

In this research, a new approach for TWS (Track While Scan) systems is introduced. Conventional TWS systems usually use target’s position (in Cartesian or polar coordinate systems), its velocity, and sometimes its acceleration (in main directions of coordinate system which is being used) as the elements of target’s state vector but the suggested algorithms use target’s velocity, course of motion and their rates of change as main tracking quantities and target’s position will be calculated after updating its velocity and course of motion. Hough transform is used as a powerful tool in detecting patterns which are identified with finite parameters (like lines, circles, ellipses, etc) to... 

The usage of the Hough transform, which has been proposed to detect straight lines in digital images, is studied as a target detector in search radars and its performance is compared with the conventional detectors. Then, a new method based on the Hough transform is introduced for detecting targets in a 3-D r-φ-t data space. The effectiveness of the new 3-D Hough detector is demonstrated through deriving the detection statistics analytically and comparing the results with those of several comprehensive simulations. The proposed detector is also evaluated with real radar data and its efficiency is confirmed. Then, the Average and Generalized Likelihood Ratio detectors are derived as the... 

In the recent decades, the estimation of direction of arrival has been an active area and some high resolution direction finding methods like MUSIC and ESPIRIT have been developed. These methods suffer from factors like mutual coupling. Direction of arrival estimation in presence of mutual coupling is a widely studied problem. In order to resolve this problem, many array calibration algorithms have been developed. However it may be impossible or difficult to set some calibration source in some situation. In this work we show that the effect of mutual coupling can be dynamically compensated by the inherent mechanism. First we show that how mutual coupling can degrades the performance of...