Enhanced monopulse radar tracking using empirical mode decomposition

Monopulse radar processors are used to track targets that appear in the look direction beamwidth. The target tracking information (range, azimuth angle, and elevation angle) are affected when manmade high power interference (jamming) is introduced to the radar processor through the radar antenna main lobe (main lobe interference) or antenna side lobe (side lobe interference). This interference changes the values of the error voltage which is responsible for directing the radar antenna towards the target. A monopulse radar structure that uses filtering in the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) domain is presented in this paper. EMD is carried out for the complex radar chirp signal with subsequent denoising and thresholding processes used to decrease the noise level in the radar processed data. The performance enhancement of 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.