Feature-Aided RGPO Jamming Discrimination Within Wideband Radar Maneuvering Target Tracking

Range gate pull-off (RGPO) jamming is often released along with target maneuvering to escape radar tracking locking, which poses crucial challenges on radar to maintain high-probability target tracking. The key solution is to accurately discriminate and extract RGPO jamming within a brief period. In this article, a real-time jamming discrimination algorithm is developed to keep target tracking optimal when target maneuver and RGPO are simultaneously present. The algorithm exploits complete wideband features, including amplitude, phase, and fluctuation characteristics, implicated in the high-resolution range profiles. To assemble both target motion states and wideband features, a likelihood ratio statistic testing subject to the noncentralized chi-square distribution is constructed to perform jamming discrimination with constant false alarm rate during signal-domain Kalman tracking filtering. Compared to conventional anti-RGPO jamming approaches, the proposed jamming discriminator has advantages in both efficiency and accuracy aspects, which is confirmed by extensive experiments.