A method of resolution enhancement for microwave active sensor such as marine radar is proposed in this paper. The resolution of an active sensor is determined by it's signal bandwidth and antenna beam width. Therefore, resolution enhancament generally requires to change the hardware of transmitter and receiver of the sensor or enlarge the antenna size. But this is usually limited in practical applications.
This paper introduces a resolution enhancement method based on inversion method which can enhance the resolution of active sensors by signal processing without changing their hardware or enlarging their antennas.
Deconvolution methods in frequency domain and spatial domain are described first. The effectiveness of these methods are shown by simulation. Then, some examples of resolution enhancement are applied to both marine radar and ground based pulse radar. The results of practical experiments show that these methods are effective and useful for upgrading radars by simply processing the received signals. The comparison between the two kinds of method in different domains shows that the processing in frequency domain is better than that in spatial domain when real time processing is required. A method about how to determine the optimum value of parameter α in revised Wiener filter is also proposed in this paper.