Detection of Polyphase Codes Radar Signals in Low SNR

A novel effective detection method is proposed for electronic intelligence (ELINT) systems detecting polyphase codes radar signal in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenario. The core idea of the proposed method is first to calculate the time-frequency distribution of polyphase codes radar signals via Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD); then the modified Hough transform (HT) is employed to cumulate all the energy of WVD’s ridges effectively to achieve signal detection. Compared with the generalised Wigner Hough transform (GWHT) method, the proposed method has a superior performance in low SNR and is not sensitive to the code type. Simulation results verify the validity of the proposed method.