Randomized Stepped Frequency Radars Exploiting Block Sparsity of Extended Targets: A Theoretical Analysis

Randomized stepped frequency radar (RSFR) is very attractive for tasks under complex electromagnetic environment. Due to the synthetic high range resolution in RSFRs, a target usually occupies a series of range cells and is called an extended target. To reconstruct the range-Doppler information in a RSFR, previous studies based on sparse recovery mainly exploit the sparsity of the target scene but do not adequately address the extended-target characteristics, which exist in many practical applications. Block sparsity, which combines the sparsity and the target extension, better characterizes a priori knowledge of the target scene in a wideband RSFR. This paper studies the RSFR range-Doppler reconstruction problem using block sparse recovery. Particularly, we theoretically analyze the block coherence and spectral norm of the observation matrix in RSFR and build a bound on the parameters of the radar, under which the exact recovery of the range-Doppler information is guaranteed. Both simulation and field-experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the block sparse recovery over conventional sparse recovery in RSFRs.