Empirical mode decomposition-based monopulse processor for enhanced radar tracking in the presence of high-power interference

Monopulse radars are used to track targets that appear in the look direction beam width. The distortion of the tracking information produced when high power interference signals (jamming) are introduced through the radar antenna can cause severe erroneous outcomes from the monopulse tracking processor. This leads to errors in the target tracking angles that may cause target mistracking. New monopulse radar structures that utilizes an empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based denoising processor are presented in this paper. EMD filtering is carried out for the complex radar chirp signal with subsequent detrending, thresholding, and denoising processes. These processes are used to decrease the noise level in the radar processed data to improve the signal to noise ratio. The performance enhancement using the monopulse radar tracking system with EMD based filtering is included using the standard deviation angle estimation error (STDAE) for different jamming scenarios and different target SNRs. STDAE shows that the new EMD based system works well in the case of main beam interference and side lobe interference for the conventional processor and, in the case of the spatial adaptive processor, is effective in the case of main lobe interference.