Patent ID: 7602331
Filing Date: 2009-10-13
Classification: G01S

Abstract:
1. A method for estimating the range profile of a physical system that characterizes the location of scatterers in the physical system as designated by a plurality of range cells, comprising: transmitting an energy pulse waveform to the physical system, wherein a discrete-time version of the transmitted waveform is denoted as the column vector s=[s receiving a return signal produced by scattering of the transmitted waveform by the physical system as represented by the convolution of the transmitted waveform with the impulse response of the physical system, the received return signal being denoted in discrete notation at the l for l=0, . . . , L+N−2, where x(l)=[x(l) x(l−1) . . . x(l−N+4] T is the portion of the range profile that the transmitted waveform s convolves with at delay l, v(l) is a sample of an additive noise signal, and L is the number of range cells of interest; computing an estimate {circumflex over (x)}(l) of the impulse response of the physical system and thereby the range profile as: where {tilde over (w)}(l) is a piecewise Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) pulse compression filter; computing {tilde over (w)}(l) by combining M number of length-K filter segments corresponding to M number of length-K segments of the received signal y(l), and wherein the m for m=0, 1, . . . , M−1, where {tilde over (y)} m (l) is the m th length-K segment of the N contiguous samples of the received signal y(l); and, combining the filter segments {tilde over (w)} for each individual range cell l=0, 1, . . . , L−1.