A Pulse Repetition Rate Compressive Sampler for Radar Target Detection

Abstract

Compressive sampling (CS) is an attractive method to implement analog-to-information conversion (AIC) for a sub-Nyquist radar, where random demodulation (RD) is the most successful AIC. However, RD only considers the sparse characteristic of one single radar pulse, and its mixing circuit still works at the Nyquist sampling rate. To exploit the strong correlation of radar echo pulses, this letter presents a pulse repetition rate compressive sampler for radar target detection. It can acquire these highly correlated pulses by setting a different sampling start time for each pulse and compresses each pulse into one single sample, which means that the low compressive sampling rate is equal to the pulse repetition rate. Compared with RD, this new system reduces the complexity of the hardware circuit and improves the signal compression ratio. Experimental results verify that the proposed radar system outperforms RD by achieving target detection from compressive samples without signal recovery.