Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Radar Signal Processing

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a superior book! There is nothing comparable in either the general radar or the signal processing literature. It provides an exceptionally clear treatment of difficult subject matter. The author patiently guides the reader through radar basics and then into the depths of the associated data processing concepts. The treatment is so lucid that even a neophyte can expect to develop a deep understanding of the concepts involved and be able to apply them immediately (i.e.,When the boss comes in and says, "You're my radar expert. Tell me how you're going to process the all the data!", this book is the antidote to the ensuing panic attack.). The clarity of the brief radar dicussions throughout the text (e.g., the SAR chapter)will provide glimmers of additional insight on radar even to those with indepth knowledge of the area.

The sensor-related texts by Georgia Tech authors are of uniformly high quality. This is the best of the lot.

I have enjoyed this book enormously throughout. While there are a fairly large number of radar books available, this is the first that I have read that lays out the signal processing aspects of radar in such a coherent, pedagogically sound, and self-contained way, generally from first principles. For example, the exposition of slow and fast time processing throughout the book was very illuminating, as was the connection drawn between the Neyman-Pearson receiver and the matched filter. The only other text I have seen that combines such clarity of vision, readability, and rigor is the book by Peebles, which unfortunately has little material on digital radar signal processing.

This text definitely fills a void in the unclassified radar textbook literature. Perhaps if one looks in a library for some out-of-print titles such as those from the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series, one might find similar coverage. However this text is "in print", modern, and up-to-date.

Chapter 2 deals with some basic topics about radar signals, and Chapter 3 discusses sampling and quantization topics, which are vital in the modern DSP era. Chapter 4 discusses Matched Filters and the signal processing of a number of modulated radar waveforms. Chapter 5 discusses Doppler processing, which is an important modern topic.

Chapter 6 discusses Radar Threshold Detection. However, if one truly wants to grasp the detection problem, one ought to read Volumes I & III of Van Trees, the first covering the basics of Detection and Estimation Theory, and the latter covering the D&E problem for Radar with some in depth mathematics.

Chapters 7,8, and 9 of Richards proceed to deal with the advanced topics of CFAR Detection, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), beamforming, and Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP). All in all, starting with the basics, this book by Richards is a pretty thorough coverage of Radar Signal Processing.

If one wants to understand radar from a DSP perspective, first read Skolnik's "Introduction To Radar Systems" to get a basic understanding of how radar works. Then read this book by Richards to understand radar DSP.

It is a good book for beginners who want to learn the fundamentals of radar signal processing. Derivations are clear and easy to understand. However, if you need an in-depth analysis o the subject you should try other resources.

This book covers some very interesting topics however it is not well written.
The book is hard reading, both due to the way chapters are structured and the way in which individual paragraphs are written. I did learn from this book, but it takes a lot of effort, you really need to have some idea of what the author is talking about to understand fully what he is saying.