Biologically Inspired Processing of Radar Waveforms for Enhanced Delay-Doppler Resolution

In this paper, we study an approach to the processing of radar signals motivated by the neural processing of echolocation waveforms by certain species of bats. We propose a transmission strategy and a corresponding family of processing algorithms and study the resulting delay-Doppler resolution characteristics. We investigate both the improvement in delay-Doppler resolution and the generation of artifacts in the delay-Doppler maps generated by this approach. Because the resulting schemes are not optimal for detection, we investigate the degradation in detection performance when compared to the matched filter. The contribution of the proposed scheme is a significant improvement in delay-Doppler resolution without a significant increase in system or computational complexity or a significant degradation in detection performance.