Development Of Programmable Imaging Laser Radar Signal Simulator

Imaging laser radar has the advantages of high angle resolution, high measurement accuracy, high anti-jamming power and so on. For it has so many advantages, imaging laser radar has become the focus of military attention all over the world day after day. In fact, its most outstanding advantages is that it has the capability of producing intensity image and range image at the same time. The whole information of intensity and range then constitutes the full 3-dimensional (3-D) information of target, which holding more information on target recognition and position compare to passive infrared and other image methods. No matter on design or application, the traditional radar signal simulator has developed very well, but imaging laser radar in this aspect is just at primary stage, especially in inland, almost no correlative report.For the whole radar system, laser radar simulator has two important effects. First of all, it could test the capability of radar's hardware. Not only could it test the capability of detection of radar, but also could test the whole hardware of radar which are the rest devices after the signal receiver, for example, IF power amplifier, DSP system, etc.. Secondly, we could design and research the algorithms for image processing techniques and target recognition conveniently via radar signal simulator. Then we could estimate effect and efficiency of various algorithms, viz. execution time, so that we can find the best image processing algorithm for imaging laser radar which we designed.At the beginning of this paper, the signal features of imaging laser radar are analyzed. After various simulating methods have been compared, we decide to design our imaging laser radar signal simulator with digital method. Our design has two parts mainly, digital block and analog block. In the digital part, firstly, we produced the target scene storehouse via 3DS MAX and OpenGL. Then according to the principle of scanning coherent pulsed laser imaging radar system and the statistic noise model from MIT laboratory, we add noise to our target scene storehouse base on the SNR which we required. After got the range image and intensity image, we change them into digital signal and send to analog block. In the analog part, we develop a IF pulsed signal source. It has three parts which...