Analysing and compensating the effects of range and Doppler frequency migrations in linear frequency modulation pulse compression radar

The pulse compression and Doppler processing (PCDP) method has been extensively used to detect low-speed and uniform-speed targets in linear frequency modulation (LFM) pulse compression radar. However, the PCDP method is affected by range migration (RM) and Doppler frequency migration (DFM) when detecting high-speed and accelerating targets. In this paper, the authors analyse and quantify these effects, and obtain the relationships of the optimal number of pulses and the threshold number of pulses with RM and DFM. It shows that when the number of pulses equals its optimal value, the maximum output signal-to-noise ratio can be obtained; when the number of pulses is greater than its threshold value, the migrations should be compensated. Then the authors propose a method based on the scaling processing and the fractional Fourier transform to remove the two migrations. In the end, the authors give a target detection experiment to show that the proposed method can effectively compensate these migrations.