Adaptive subspace detection of extended target in white Gaussian noise using sinc basis

For the high resolution radar (HRR), the problem of detecting the extended target is considered in this paper. Based on a single observation, a new two-step detection based on sparse representation (TSDSR) method is proposed to detect the extended target in the presence of Gaussian noise with unknown covariance. In the new method, the Sinc dictionary is introduced to sparsely represent the high resolution range profile (HRRP). Meanwhile, adaptive subspace pursuit (ASP) is presented to recover the HRRP embedded in the Gaussian noise and estimate the noise covariance matrix. Based on the Sinc dictionary and the estimated noise covariance matrix, one step subspace detector (OSSD) for the first-order Gaussian (FOG) model without secondary data is adopted to realise the extended target detection. Finally, the proposed TSDSR method is applied to raw HRR data. Experimental results demonstrate that HRRPs of different targets can be sparsely represented very well with the Sinc dictionary. Moreover, the new method can estimate the noise power with tiny errors and have a good detection performance.