Multipath signal resolving and time delay estimation for high range resolution radar

High range resolution radar target signature is a promising signature for radar automatic target recognition (ATR), and the multipath time-delay is used for height finding in high range resolution radar recently. We address multipath time-delay estimation under the scenario of closely spaced multipath for high range resolution radar, the target scattered signature can be resolved via the estimated channel parameters. By using the prior information of the typical multipath channel structure in radar application, a channel constrained MODE-RELAX algorithm is proposed to estimate the channel parameters. The resolved target signatures are used to evaluate the classification performance. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can estimate the time-delay very well for many cases, and the classification performance can be improved via the resolved signal.