Compressive Detection Using Sub-Nyquist Radars for Sparse Signals

This paper investigates the compression detection problem using sub-Nyquist radars, which is well suited to the scenario of high bandwidths in real-time processing because it would significantly reduce the computational burden and save power consumption and computation time. A compressive generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detector for sparse signals is proposed for sub-Nyquist radars without ever reconstructing the signal involved. The performance of the compressive GLRT detector is analyzed and the theoretical bounds are presented. The compressive GLRT detection performance of sub-Nyquist radars is also compared to the traditional GLRT detection performance of conventional radars, which employ traditional analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) at Nyquist sampling rates. Simulation results demonstrate that the former can perform almost as well as the latter with a very small fraction of the number of measurements required by traditional detection in relatively high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) cases.