A Range Sidelobe Suppression Technique Based on Adaptive Spectral Shaping for LFM Waveforms

This paper considers the problem of adaptively controlling range sidelobes of target returns for radar systems employing linear frequency modulated (LFM) waveforms. Conventional pulse compression method uses a fixed window to shape the spectral response of a reference waveform to control the range sidelobes of all radar returns. This non-adaptive approach needs to apply a severe spectral window with a peak to sidelobe ratio (PSR) that exceeds the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the strongest return to ensure successful detection of weak targets in the presence of strong radar returns. This leads to unnecessary processing loss for weak targets. In this paper we propose a new range sidelobe suppression technique that adaptively shapes target spectral response to reduce the processing loss, in particular for weak targets, thereby improving detection sensitivity of the radar systems. It is significantly less complex than many existing range sidelobe suppression techniques. We verify the performance improvement of the proposed adaptive technique over the conventional non-adaptive technique using both simulated and real data.