An FM-CW radar system for the detection of objects buried in sandy ground is explored and is applied to a field measurement. The key factors for underground FM-CW radar performance are the center frequency and bandwidth determining the depth at which the radar can detect targets and the resolution in the range direction. In order for FM-CW radar sounding, two ridged horn antennas are employed in the system, which are operative in the frequency range of 250-1000MHz. The impedance matching to the ground is optimized by measuring the echo strength from a fixed target as a function of the spacing interval between the antenna aperture and the ground surface. It is shown that the radar with an output power of 18dBm could detect a metallic plate (30100cm) and a pipe (10cmφ) buried at the depth of 1.2m. Also the synthetic aperture technique together with an averaging and subtracting method produced fine image in shallow region up to 100cm in the sandy ground.

A fully focused Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image can be obtained only if the raw data processing procedure takes into account the space-variance of the SAR system transfer function. This paper presents a nonconventional Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm which allows an efficient compensation of the space-variant effect. It is specially designed for the SAR data of the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS-1) but can be extended to different cases.

This letter presents a new method for adaptive control of nonminimum phase discrete-time systems with disturbances based on the technique of pole-zero placement. The long division method is used to decompose apolynomial into a stable polynomial and an unstable one. Finally, the results of computer simulation are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The antennas for subsurface radar are usually covered with a conducting cavity to prevent the radiation field from affecting the electromagnetic environment and to protect the received field from external noises. Furthermore, radiowave absorber is attached to the interior wall of the cavity in order to suppress the multiple reflections in the cavity. In this paper, the characteristics of the two-dimensional cavity-backed antenna having the absorber and the over-all properties of this subsurface radar due to buried objects are numerically analyzed by the Finite-Difference Time-Domain method. It is shown that the pulse propagation in the ground is confined to the narrow region due to the cavity. It is also shown that the multiple reflections in the cavity are effectively suppressed by choosing the suitable absorber, and so that the distinctive pulse echo can be obtained.

Radar imaging technique is one of the most powerful tool for underground detection. However, performance of conventional methods is not sufficiently high when the observational direction or the aperture size is restricted. In the present paper, an image reconstruction method based on a model fitting with nonlinear least-squares has been developed, which is applicable to arbitrarily arranged arrays. Reconstruction is executed on the assumption that targets consist of discrete point scatterers embedded in a homogeneous medium. Model fitting is iterated as the number of point target in the assumed model is increased, until the residual in fitting becomes unchanged or small enough. A penalty function is used in nonlinear least-squares to make the algorithm stable. Fundamental characteristics of the method revealed with computer simulation are described. This method focuses a much sharper image than that obtained by the conventional aperture synthesis technique.

The size and weight of marine pulse radar systems must be limited in order to mount them on board boats. However, the azimuthal resolution of a marine radar with a small antenna is degraded by the antenna beam width. It is desirable to use signal processing techniques to increase both the azimuthal resolution and the range resolution of such systems without changing their external configuration. This paper introduces a resolution enhancement method based on deconvolution, which is a kind of inversion. The frequency domain deconvolution method is described first. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by simulation. Then, an example of resolution enhancement processing is applied to a pulse radar. The results of practical experiments show that this method is a promising way of upgrading radars by simply processing the received signals.

In the ISAR (Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar), when a target is to be recognized by use of the radar image produced from the radar echoes, it is important first to estimate the scale of the target. To estimate the scale, the rotating motion of the target must be estimated. This paper describes a method for estimating the scale of the target from the information on the radar image by converting the target figure into a simple model and estimating the rotating motion of the target.

This paper proposes that the statistical property of the wave form obtained by a pulse type subsurface radar follows the Weibull probability density distribution. The shape parameter of this distribution is related to the underground condition. By using the shape parameter, we calculated the statistical variance. The ratio of the variance of target area to that of non-target area in invisible medium is evaluated for the effect of the radar signal processing. Over 20dB improvement, for example, can be obtained by means of Log/CFAR processing. It made clear that the cell size of processing should be selected the length corresponding to self-correlation.

This paper describes fundamental system of borehole radars and its recent progress in Japan. Early development of borehole radars were carried out for detection of cracks in crystallized rock, however, the fields of applications are expanding to other various objects such as soil and sedimental rocks. Conventionally developed radar systems are not necessarily suitable for these applications and they must be modified. New technologies such as radar polarimetry and radar tomography were also introduced.

A multi-beam airborne pulsed-Doppler radar (MBR) system is presented and its clutter rejection performance compared with conventional phased array radar (PAR)'s by PRF tuning is discussed. The pulsed-Doppler radar equations taking account of the multi-beam operation are introduced and some kinds of computer simulations for seeking the conditions to get maximum signal to clutter ratio are carried out. As a results of this, it is cleared that same order of signal to clutter ratio improvement gotten in high PRF operation by conventional PAR can be realized at lower PRF operation by MBR on clutter free area, and higher clutter rejection effect, which is proportional to beam numbers, is obtained under affection of both of mainlobe and sidelobe clutters with order of beam numbers. This also means observable numbers of range bin are increased in MBR operation.

Weibull-distributed clutter are reviewed. Most of the clutter received by L, S, C, X and Ku band radars obey Weibull distribution. Clutter suppression techniques for Weibull clutter are also reviewed. Especially, the generalized Weibull CFAR detector is emphasized. The approch is to estimate the shape and scale parameters of the Weibull clutter using order statistics and then use them in the detector. The generalized CFAR detector transforms the Weibull clutter distribution into a normalized exponential distribution. When a target is present, the transformation produces a large error that can be used to detect the target. Actual data taken by a Ku band radar are used to compare the proposed method with another method to estimate the Weibull parameters and with the Weibull CFAR detector. Order statistics estimation requires a small number of samples and can be used to find the local value of Weibull clutter parameters and, thus, the proposed method requires less computational time to find the Weibull parameters.

This paper presents a collision warning system that uses laser radar to measure the distance to a preceding vehicle and issues an audible warning to alert the driver if a safe headway is not maintained. The laser radar system is of the cooperative type in that it detects light reflected from a reflex reflector attached at the rear of other vehicles. With a 10-watt pulsed laser, a maximum detection range of over 100m is obtained. The construction and operation of the collision warning system are described along with the configuration of the optical system used in the laser radar head and the results of detection performance evaluations.

Gamma(γ)-ray irradiation effects have been investigated on three types of low-noise HEMTs, AlGaAs/GaAs conventional HEMT (conv. HEMT), AlGaAs/InGaAs pseudomorphic HEMT (P-HEMT) and InAlAs/InGaAs/InP HEMT (InP-based HEMT). The dose of irradiated γ-rays ranges from 1105 to 1108 rad. DC and RF characteristics of each type of HEMT are measured before and after irradiation and the parameter changes are investigated. For conv. HEMT and P-HEMT, no degradation of DC parameter is observed up to 108 rad, while noise figure (NF) at 12 GHz remains constant up to 107 rad and degrades by 0.1 dB at 108 rad. The InP-based HEMT shows IDSS and gm increase by about 10% at a dose of 108 rad and its NF at 18 GHz lowers gradually with the radiation dose. It has been found that the radiation hardness is greater than 107 rad for all types of HEMTs and over a hundred years of life can be expected against γ-ray irradiation in the space environment.

A new Viterbi algorithm with adaptive path reduction method is presented. The proposed system consists of the pre-decoder and reduced path Virerbi decoder. The predecoder separates the mixed channel noise from the received sequence. The number of errors in the pre-decoded error sequence is counted and the path reduction is implemented by the number of errors in pre-decoded error sequence. The path reduction is implemented as a function of channel condition because the errors in the pre-decoded error sequence can be considered as the channel error sequence. Due to the reduction of the path, the number of ACS (add compare select) operations can be reduced, which occupies the dominant part in Viterbi decoding. The ACS reduction ratio for the proposed system achieves up to 30% for the case of (2, 1, 2) Ungerboeck code without degradation of the error performance.

An adaptive multichannel IIR lattice predictor for k-step ahead prediction is constructed and the effectiveness of the proposed predictor is evaluated using digital simulations.

This paper describes an adaptive sensing system with tracking and zooming a moving object in the stable environment. Both the close contour matching technique and the effective determination of zoom ratio by fuzzy control are proposed for achieving the sensing system. First, the estimation of object feature parameters, 2-dimensional velocity and size, is based on close contour matching. The correspondence problem is solved with cross-correlation in projections extracted from object contours in the specialized difference images. In the stable environment, these contours matching, capable of eliminating occluded contours or random noises as well as background, works well without heavy-cost optical flow calculation. Next, in order to zoom the tracked object in accordance with the state of its shape or movement practically, fuzzy control is approached first. Three sets of input membership function--the confidence of object shape, the variance of object velocity, and the object size--are evaluated with the simplified implementation. The optimal focal length is achieved of not only desired size but safe tracking in combination with fuzzy rule matrix constituted of membership functions. Experimental results show that the proposed system is robust and valid for numerous kind of moving object in real scene with system period 1.85 sec.

An automatic tap assignment method in sub-band adaptive filter is proposed in this letter. The number of taps of the adaptive filter in each band is controlled by the mean-squared error. The numbers of taps increase in the bands which have large errors, while they decrease in the bands having small errors, until residual errors in all the bands become the same. In this way, the number of taps in a band is roughly proportional to the length of the impulse response of the unknown system in this band. The convergence rate and the residual error are improved, in comparison with existing uniform tap assignment. Effectiveness of the proposed method has been confirmed through computer simulation.

In this letter, a new structure of adaptive IIR notch filter is presented. The structure is based on direct form realization and uses the similar adaptation algorithm given in Ref. (4). A quantitative analysis for convergence properties is developed. It is shown that the proposed structure shows superior performance comparing with previously proposed designs. The results of computer simulations are presented to substantiate the analysis.

This paper proposes a multi-layer cellular network in which a self-organizing method is implemented. The network is developed for the purpose of data clustering and recognition. A multi-layer structure is presented to realize the sophisticated combination of several sub-spaces which are spanned by given input characteristic data. A self-organizing method is useful for evaluating the set of clusters for input data without a supervisor. Thus, using these techniques this network can provide good clustering ability as an example for image/pattern data which have complicated and structured characteristics. In addition to the development of this algorithm, this paper also presents a parallel VLSI architecture for realizing the mechanism with high efficiency. Since the locality can be kept among all processing elements on every layer, the system is easily designed without large global data communication.

We observed a ship as a radar target embedded in sea clutter using a millimeter wave radar. The shape of the ship and sea clutter were discriminated by using texture analysis in image processing. As a discriminator, a nonlinear transformation of a local pattern was defined to deal with high order statistics.