An improvement to the pulse compression scheme

The pulse-compression is a technique mainly used in sonar, radar and echography to augment the range resolution as well as the signal to noise ratio. This is achieved using a matched-filtering of the received signal with the bandpass transmitted signal. Taking into account the main assumptions of the matched filter theory, the use of the bandpass transmitted pulse as matched filter´s impulse response is only available if the useful signal is well known and if the noise is white, which is not the case in practice. For this reason, we propose to improve the classical pulse-compression technique using the stochastic matched filter, which ensures a maximization of the signal to noise ratio, when the useful signal is a realization of a random process and the disturbing signal a colored noise. Results obtained on synthetic and real data are proposed and discussed.