Attributed Scattering Center Extraction Method for Microwave Photonic Signals Using DSM-PMM-Regularized Optimization

The microwave photonic (MWP) radar has the capability of generating ultrawideband (UWB) signals. It is a challenge to realize accurate extraction of attributed scattering centers (ASCs) from MWP signals. This manuscript presents a scattering parameter estimation method in the image domain for UWB MWP signals. The polar-to-rectangular resampling is required for UWB MWP signals. Therefore, a range-azimuth decoupled representation based on the ASC model is formed. The model parameter estimation is converted into an optimization problem, where the statistics of the target signal and the features of interest are modeled to provide prior information. The distribution spread maximization (DSM) and peak magnitude maximization (PMM) principles in the optimization embody this prior information. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) is utilized to search for the parameters of each ASC in the image domain. Moreover, the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm is introduced to avoid repeated computation. Experimental results conducted on the simulated data, XPATCH data, and real data confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method takes into account the specific features of UWB MWP signals, which are neglected in the existing studies. Therefore, the proposed method performs better in extracting ASC parameters from UWB MWP signals in terms of accuracy and more complete sets.