Joint RFI Mitigation and Radar Echo Recovery for One-Bit UWB Radar

Radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation and radar echo recovery are critically important for the proper functioning of ultra-wideband (UWB) radar systems using one-bit sampling techniques. We recently introduced a technique for one-bit UWB radar, which first uses a majorization-minimization method for RFI parameter estimation followed by a sparse method for radar echo recovery. However, this technique suffers from high computational complexity due to the need to estimate the parameters of each RFI source separately and iteratively. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient joint RFI mitigation and radar echo recovery framework to greatly reduce the computational cost. Specifically, we exploit the sparsity of RFI in the fast-frequency domain and the sparsity of radar echoes in the fast-time domain to design a one-bit weighted SPICE (SParse Iterative Covariance-based Estimation) based framework for the joint RFI mitigation and radar echo recovery of one-bit UWB radar. Both simulated and experimental results are presented to show that the proposed one-bit weighted SPICE framework can not only reduce the computational cost but also outperform the existing approach for decoupled RFI mitigation and radar echo recovery of one-bit UWB radar.

RFI Mitigation for One-bit UWB Radar Systems

Radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation is critical to the proper operation of ultra-wideband (UWB) radar systems since RFI can severely degrade the radar imaging capability and target detection performance. In this paper, we address the RFI mitigation problem for one-bit UWB radar systems. A one-bit UWB system obtains its signed measurements via a low-cost and high rate sampling scheme, referred to as the Continuous Time Binary Value (CTBV) technology. This sampling strategy compares the signal to a known threshold varying with slow-time and therefore can be used to achieve a rather high sampling rate and quantization resolution with rather simple and affordable hardware. This paper establishes a proper data model for the RFI sources and proposes a novel RFI mitigation method for the one-bit UWB radar system that uses the CTBV sampling technique. Specifically, we first model the RFI sources as a sum of sinusoids with frequencies fixed during the coherent processing interval (CPI) and we exploit the sparsity of the RFI spectrum. We extend a majorization-minimization based 1bRELAX algorithm, referred to as 1bMMRELAX, to estimate the RFI source parameters from the signed measurements obtained by using the CTBV sampling strategy. We also devise a new fast frequency initialization method based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) methodology for the extended 1bMMRELAX algorithm to significantly improve its computational efficiency. Moreover, an ADMM-based sparse method is introduced to recover the desired radar echoes using the estimated RFI parameters. Both simulated and experimental results are presented to demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing digital integration method, especially for severe RFI cases.