A Closed-Form Estimate for the Correlation Coefficient of Noise-Type Radars

The target detection performance of radars with noise-like waveforms, including both standard noise radars and quantum two-mode squeezing radars, is dictated by a correlation coefficient which specifies how similar the received signal is to the template used for matched filtering. Previous work has shown that an estimator for this correlation coefficient can be used as a detector for target detection. However, this estimator requires the use of an expensive numerical minimization. Inspired by certain mathematical similarities between noise radar and two-channel synthetic aperture radar, we propose a simplified estimator which leads to the same detection performance in simulations. However, this estimator is significantly less computationally expensive, being a closed-form expression that can easily be calculated from radar data.