Compensation of THz Radar Signals for Atmospheric Effects Based on Range Profile Matching

the terahertz (THz) radar signal distorted by atmospheric propagation should be calibrated to suppress paired echoes in radar images. In this paper, to compensate THz radar signals for atmospheric effects, a procedure is proposed to estimate atmospheric condition based on range profile matching. The scattering centers in the range profile are identified via local maximum clustering to extract the distorted separable scattering centers. An atmospheric lookup table is generated to characterize typical atmospheric condition. The range profile of an arbitrary separable scattering center is simulated under different atmospheric condition to match with the extracted scattering center. The atmospheric condition achieving the highest correlation coefficient is used to compensate for atmospheric effects. To validate the proposed procedure, the THz radar echo composed of several scattering centers is simulated under random atmospheric condition, regarding as the distorted signal for calibration. The estimated atmospheric condition is slightly different from the set values, while the range profile distortion caused by paired echoes is noticeably suppressed using the proposed procedure.