Novel Noise-Tolerant Method for Extracting Target Resonances Using Pulse Radar

A novel method is proposed for extracting target-resonance signatures from the late-time response (LTR) of impulse-radar measurements with low signal-to-noise ratios. The method estimates the LTR's content in terms of weakly-attenuating sinusoids. We show the necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the LTR expansion in the noise-free case. In the non- and weakly-attenuating cases, we present a method of estimating the components in the presence of noise with known variance by correcting for the cumulative effect of this noise. Examples based on synthetic and measured data demonstrate improved performance in the presence of significant noise when compared to the classical matrix-pencil method.