Sub-Nyquist radar receiver based on photonics-assisted compressed sensing and cascaded dictionaries

A sub-Nyquist radar receiver based on photonics-assisted compressed sensing is proposed. Cascaded dictionaries are applied to extract the delay and the Doppler frequency of the echo signals, which do not need to accumulate multiple echo periods and can achieve better Doppler accuracy. An experiment is performed. Radar echoes with different delays and Doppler frequencies are undersampled and successfully reconstructed to obtain the delay and Doppler information of the targets. Experimental results show that the average reconstruction error of the Doppler frequency is 5.33 kHz using an 8-μs radar signal under the compression ratio of 5. The proposed method provides a promising solution for the sub-Nyquist radar receiver.