Deep neural network-aided coherent integration method for maneuvering target detection

•A novel deep neural network-aided long-time coherent integration algorithm for radar maneuvering target detection is proposed.•The proposed algorithm can achieve close-to-optimal detection performance but with a low computational cost.•Real measured data are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Generalized Radon-Fourier transform (GRFT) is a classical long-time coherent integration method for radar maneuvering target detection. GRFT, whose core is to achieve motion parameter estimation via searching, can almost reach the optimal detection performance but heavily suffers from the high computational cost. Motivated by the fact that motion parameter estimation is essentially a non-linear mapping from the radar echo to the target’s motion parameters, one can use a deep neural network (DNN), a kind of modeling tool that can learn complex mappings from training data, to directly realize this mapping, thus alleviating the heavy computational burden brought by the searching efforts. Based on this idea, a DNN-aided long-time coherent integration algorithm, which can be viewed as a fast implementation of GRFT, is proposed in this paper. More specifically, we first use a pre-trained DNN to roughly estimate the motion parameters of the target to be detected from the radar echo, and then accomplish the coherent integration of the target for detection via a fine grid search in the neighborhood of the obtained rough estimation results. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve the detection performance close to that of GRFT but with a much lower computational cost.