Coherent‐like integration for PD radar target detection based on short‐time Fourier transform

In the context of white complex Gaussian noise, this study presents one constant false‐alarm rate mono‐pulse detector for both the narrowband and wideband pulse‐Doppler (PD) radars. To this end, coherent‐like integration is proposed to improve the signal‐to‐noise ratios of one radar echo. The PD radar returned signals are first performed by stretch processing. Stretched signals are analysed by short‐time Fourier transform (STFT) in the time–frequency representation. Coherent‐like integration is then utilised to operate the two‐dimensional (2D) STFT matrix and the new 2D matrices after coherent‐like integration are decomposed to obtain singular values. Finally, the largest singular value, which is assumed to be corresponding to an isolated scatterer for narrowband PD radars (dominate scatterer for wideband PD radars) is selected as the test static to be compared with the detection threshold. Since the new detector is not highly sensitive to the target motion, it can solve the detection problem of the high‐speed manoeuvring target. Furthermore, the experiments based on raw data are conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed detector.