The detection of radar pulse sequences by means of a continuous wavelet transform

A wavelet transform is introduced as a means of detecting the characteristic scale or period T of a radar pulse sequence in an incoming stream of pulses. A particular choice of mother wavelet contains a fixed number, M, of cycles of a complex exponential, which provides a resolution of 1/M times T. The transform operates on interleaved guise sequences and, by thresholding, determines T for each component sequence. The detector is robust against missing pulses and timing jitter and is sensitive to simple, staggered and complex pulse sequences. The method is an improvement on other established approaches, such as the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) histogram and the periodogram.