Mitigation of target distortion in pulse-agile sensors via Richardson-Lucy deconvolution

Abstract

Pulse-agile radar systems are becoming more prevalent as the demand for adaptive and cognitive systems increases. This focus is motivated by the need for interference avoidance and spectrum sharing. Pulse agility within a coherent processing interval (CPI) or intra-CPI adaption has been shown to cause distortion, which will negatively impact the radar's performance. This problem can be framed in the context of image processing such that an ideal range-Doppler image is corrupted by some point spread function. Deconvolution is then applied to remove this distortion and improve radar performance while maintaining the ability to use computationally efficient fast Fourier transform-based processing.