Airborne Radar and shipborne sonar: Recent advances and compared solutions

The detection of slowly moving target in a strong backscattering background (clutter for radar, reverberation for sonar) is a challenge to both Airborne Radars and Surface Ship or Submarine Sonars communities. In this paper, after outlining the similarities and differences between the above and under-water domains, recent advances in the areas of waveforms design and beam-forming will be described. In a first part, more efficient wide-band Doppler waveforms for sonar will be introduced together with their advantages in terms of detection, and wideband coherent waveforms for radar moving targets detection will be presented. The second part will focus on the implementation of adaptive beam-forming for sonar and coloured transmission space time beam-forming for radar. Results on reverberation reduction obtained on a towed array sonar in CW mode will be discussed, and perspectives for coloured transmission radar systems will be outlined.