A state-space approach for shape reconstruction of scattering targets with step-frequency radar

To overcome the inherent limitations of image resolution by conventional FFT-based algorithms, a novel state-space approach is proposed to process the measured or simulated synthetic data received from the Step-Frequency (SF) radar system. The proposed approach, including a state-space formulation and decomposition of the generated Hankel matrix, is based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) to extract exactly the scattering intensity and positions of scattering centers on the target. As validation, simulation experiments to reconstruct the shape of small point targets (e.g. a 2-D conical target) have been developed, and the comparative results show that the proposed state-space based method has an advantage of higher resolution and less sensitivity to noise.