Abstract:

In multi-station electronic reconnaissance systems, pulse sorting and pairing are the premise of accurate emitter localization. Considering the problem of a high false alarm rate and a high missing alarm rate for sorting the pulse with an ultra-low pulse repetition frequency in conventional time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based sorting methods, this paper proposes a pulse sorting and pairing method based on the constrained extended TDOA histogram. In this method, a constraint condition with respect to pulse parameters is first introduced to obtain the valid TDOA distribution. Then, the extended iteration operation is used to complete the pulse sorting and pairing of each emitter. After reducing the chance of irrelevant pulse pairing by the constraint condition, the proposed method fundamentally decreases the number of false TDOA and noise TDOA, and effectively suppresses the generation of false emitters. Numerical experiments indicate that compared with the existing methods, the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of TDOA sorting and can achieve the accurate sorting and pairing for extremely few pulses with an ultra-low pulse repetition frequency, even for single pulses.

Key words: electronic reconnaissance, pulse sorting and pairing, Time difference of arrival, constraint condition