Joint Estimation of Range Difference and Range Rate Difference for Unknown Frequency Hopping Signals in Passive Localization

Frequency hopping (FH) signal has been widely used in military and civilian fields because of its superior anti-jamming performance. Meanwhile, its natural characteristics, i.e., hopped carrier frequency, brings a great challenge to the reconnaissance of FH emitters. To locate a high-speed moving FH emitter, the estimation of range difference (RD) and range rate difference (RRD) is a key process in passive localization. This paper proposes a joint RD and RRD estimation algorithm with the consideration of range migration (RM) during observation time. In this method, a new operation named frequency reversing transform is first presented to remove the random phase of the FH signal. Then, RD and RRD can be coherently estimated after RM correction via the scaled Fourier transform. This method accomplishes the RD and RRD estimation without knowing the hopped carrier frequencies of received FH signals, and it can be fast implemented by complex multiplications, fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse FFT operations without any searching process. Numerical experiments indicate that compared with several representative methods, the proposed estimation method achieves a better anti-noise performance with lower computational cost.