It can be seen from Equation (23)(24) that the true target peak and the false target peak both appear in the output results of the two filters and at distance unit and . This is inevitable in the direct repeater jamming mode “take 1 turn 1” and the repeated repeater jamming mode “take 1 turn N”. Besides, when the jammer repeatedly forwards a fragment containing both the sub-signals and , a true target peak and a false target peak under the same distance unit are generated in the matched filter of and . Consequently, true and false targets cannot be directly distinguished by simply comparing the results of the sub-signal pulse compression. Therefore, further processing algorithms are still needed to identify the true target peak and false target peak.
4.2. Interference Feature Identification
The above proves that the IIS of the target peak contains the energy distribution information of the corresponding signal component. However, it is not easy to distinguish or directly. On this basis, a feature parameter is extracted from the IIS for further interference identification. Due to the difference of between the interference signal and the real target echo, this paper designs a segmented accumulation method. The proposed segmented accumulation method divides into segments on average and calculates the sum of each segment separately. The sum of each segment contains part of the signal energy. Then, it is converted into the percentage in segments which represents the energy distribution of the corresponding signal segment. For the real target echo peak, the average energy distribution in each segment is uniform, with a value of . On the contrary, for the false target peak generated by the interference signal, its energy is distributed in some segments, and the energy percentage in each segment fluctuates greatly. The variance of each peak percentage is calculated as the eigenvalue of the interference signal classification.
In general, can be set to an integer below 10. Under conditions with larger Tp, it can also be a larger integer. In the process of segmentation, on the one hand, the energy difference between the interference signal and the noise signal is retained; on the other hand, the intra-segment energy fluctuation caused by noise is suppressed.
This method provides valuable eigenvalues for the identification of interference signals. However, it may fail because the inappropriate segmentation width will lead to a smaller variance of the false target peak.
For interference signals in interference modes such as “pick 1 turn 1” and “pick 1 turn N”, the width of each interference signal slice is usually the same. When using the piecewise accumulation method, if the segment width is equal to the pulse width of the interrupted-sampling signal, only several segments contain the interference signal energy, and the remaining segments contain only noise. At this time, the percentage in each segment fluctuates greatly, and a large variance will be obtained. If the segment width is equal to the pulse-repetition period of the jammer, the fluctuation within each segment is similar, and the energy of all segments is approximately equal. Therefore, the variance of percentage is small, which may lead to misjudgment of the false target peak.
To ensure that the proposed method is still effective in the above scenarios, it is necessary to estimate the width of the interference signal. Since and contains the energy distribution information of signal components, the width parameter of the interference signal can be estimated from IIS. In , the energy of the interference signal part continues to increase, and the energy of the non-interference part remains flat. Therefore, the width of the interference slice can be estimated by estimating the inflection point coordinates of the curve. Considering the influence of noise and other signals, the actual curve of is jittery. The coordinates of the inflection point cannot be estimated by directly using the second-order difference of the pair. Therefore, we can obtain the fitted piecewise straight line by finite linear fitting and then obtain the coordinates of the minimum and maximum points using second-order difference. The distance between a set of adjacent minimum and maximum points is the estimated width of the interference slice.
Let the function represent the linear fitting of a set of ordered number pairs by the least square method with lines, represent the sum of squared errors of the fitted line.
Suppose the expected number of fitted lines is . The value of can be acquired by recursion. The process is as follows:
1. Initialization. Get the values of with conventional linear fitting methods. ()
2. Recursion. Get the values of with the values of and . (, )
2.1 Divide into two groups, and , where ;
2.2 Obtain the values of and , and calculate the total error ;
2.3 Calculate the optimal fitting error , and aquire the optimal segment point ;
2.4 Calculate the values of . When , and when ,.
3. Termination. Output the values of and when .
In the absence of prior information such as the number of interference slice forwarding, it is impossible to set the number of fitting lines in advance. Then, a feasible method is to give a threshold value . If the decrease in the square sum of two consecutive errors is lower than this threshold, the fitting calculation is stopped. For example, if , and the number of fitted lines is .
Through the above method,
’s fitted piecewise straight line
can be obtained. Through the second-order difference, the coordinates
of the singular points can be obtained:
Among all
, denote the
m-th minimum point coordinates as
, and the
n-th maximum point coordinates as
, then the estimated interference slice width is
The above segment width estimation method is proposed to ensure large variance of ISRJ interference signal. It may be noted that for false target peaks that contain only one interference signal slice, the segment width estimation method based on IIS is not required. Considering the tradeoff between the interference signal estimation effect and the low computational cost, the overall scheme of anti-ISRJ interference method based on waveform design is shown in
Figure 4. The whole process is divided into two parts. The first round of interference signal recognition is just through orthogonal waveforms and the segmented width estimation method is only implemented in the second round. For most false target peaks containing only one sub-signal slice, the first round of classification is sufficient. For the false target peaks caused by ISRJ in special cases such as direct forwarding interference mode, the second round of interference recognition may be required.