Improving target detection in reverberation-limited environment via bistable system

In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting the echo from a point target in the presence of reverberation. For its strong correlation to the transmitted signal and non-Rayleigh envelope arising from sparse distribution of scatterers, reverberation decreases the performance of the conventional matched filter (MF) receiver. We propose a nonlinear receiver using the bistable system with a discrete-time autoregressive model of order 1 [AR(1)]. The signals are pre-processed by bistable systems before the MF receiver. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the performance of our proposed nonlinear receiver versus the conventional MF receiver. The reverberation is generated using the point-scatterer simulation method, and the results show that in reverberation-limited environment, our proposed nonlinear receiver may perform better and much more robust to the scatterer number than the conventional MF receiver.