FM-based multi-frequency passive radar system
Chenqi Zhang, Yong Wu
National Lab of Radar Signal Processing
Xidian University
Xi'an, China
cqzhangxidian@163.com, wuyongxidian@163.com
Abstract—Due to the obvious advantages in terms of aerial
surveillance and anti-jamming, passive radar system (PRS) has
been widely studied over the last years. However, a considerable
part of the research on the PRS has been carried out in the
laboratory environment and few practical results have been
disclosed. In this paper, the design and implementation of an
ongoing frequency modulated (FM)-based multi-frequency PRS,
which can exploit up to eight carrier frequencies to detect, locate
and track targets, is briefly introduced. For the considerations of
the portability and the data extension, the whole system is
developed based on commercial shelf products, thereby providing
great convenience for the users and developers. Currently, the
system can realize the real-time processing and data association
of eight carrier frequency signals in the practical application
rather than under the laboratory conditions. Furthermore,
several experiments including simulations and outfields have
been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed
system.
Keywords—Passive radar system; Frequency modulated; Multi-
frequency; Commercial shelf products
I. INTRODUCTION
A passive radar system (PRS) can be described as a
"receiver-only" radar, without a purposely-built transmitter. It
exploits the already-existing electromagnetic radiations such as
FM, DAB, DVB-T, etc, known as "illuminator of opportunity",
to perform target detection and target tracking [1]. Compared
with active radar, the claimed advantages of a PRS include: (1)
reduction in hardware costs since no dedicated transmitter
needs to be built; (2) entirely covert operations since no own
signal is transmitted; (3) potential advantages in detection of
targets that are known as 'stealth aircraft'. Among all the
accessible opportunity sources, frequency modulation (FM)
broadcasts are especially attractive for the high transmitted
power and for the long range coverage [2]. For this reason, the
reason, FM has almost become the most popular illuminator of
opportunity in the research of passive radar technology [3-6].
Still for the same reason, starting in the early 2011, the FM-
based multi-frequency PRS was developed to explore the
advanced technology of utilizing multi-frequency signals to
detect targets. Here, processing multi-frequency signals is
designed for the intentions of expanding detection range and
improving measurement accuracy of the PRS. After a lot of
theoretical and experimental studies, until now, the system has
978-1-5090-2708-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
Jun Wang, Zhen Luo
National Lab of Radar Signal Processing
Xidian University
Xi'an, China
wangjun@xidian.edu.cn, zhen_xidian@163.com
developed into a mature and practical one. In this paper, we
will give a relatively comprehensive description of the
proposed PRS and simultaneity show some typical results
illustrating the feasibility of the PRS.
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The whole FM-based multi-frequency PRS is installed on a
truck, a mobile platform that can be employed for real time
signal gathering and processing. The proposed PRS composes
primarily of the following components: an eight-element
circular antenna, a digital channelized receiver, a general-
purpose workstation used for real-time process and a display,
as is shown in Fig.1. The FM signals, collected from the
airspace of interest, are sent to the digital channelized receiver,
where the signals are partitioned by carrier frequency and then
converted into digital signals. Following by the conversion, the
obtained digital signals are sent to the workstation armed with
graphic processing units (GPUs), on which all the signal
processing work is performed.
Target
Digital
GPU-based
Channelized Display
Receiver
Workstation
FM
Station 1
FM
Station k
Fig.1. Sketch of the proposed PRS
Figure 2 shows the physical map of the FM-based multi-
frequency PRS. The internal detailed diagram of the signal
processing of the proposed PRS is shown in Fig.3. When the
system works, the signals collected by the eight-element
circular antenna are first processed including bandpass filtering,
A/D conversion, digital down conversion (DDC), etc, in the
digital receiver. Being packed in the defined way, the multi-
frequency FM signals are transferred to the GPU-based
workstation by high-speed Ethernet network. Next, several
beams containing echo beams and one reference beam for each
FM signal by digital beam forming (DBF) are generated and
then loaded from CPU into GPU to perform the cultter
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suppression (CS), amplitude Range-Doppler processing (ARD),
Cell-Averaging Constant False Alarm Rate (CA-CFAR) FM1
Secho1
Secho 2
CA-
detection to evaluate the ranges and Doppler frequencies of DBF CS ARD

...
CFAR
Secho17

targets of interest, respectively. Benefitting from on the S ref

Secho1

inherent parallelism of the system, all the FM signals can be Amplifier

FM2
DBF
Secho 2
CS ARD
CA-

...
CFAR
implemented and processed in real time. After performing the
Location
Bandpass Secho17 &&
filter Data S ref Tracking
real time signal processing on GPUs, all the available range- A/D
pack Secho1
Secho 2
&&
Data

Doppler points are continued to send to a terminal for the FM7

DBF CS ARD
CA- association

...
DDC CFAR
Secho17

purposes of target localization and multi-source data 88MHz~108MHz

S ref

associations.
Secho1
Secho 2
FM8 CA-
DBF CS ARD

...
CFAR
Secho17

In the signal processing stages of the proposed PRS, the S ref

clutters among each echo beam are removed using the direct
matrix inverse (DMI) algorithm, which is defined by
Data Flow

Serr  Ssur  V (V HV )1V H Ssur

: From antenna to receiver
(1) : From receiver to workstation

: From CPU to GPU

CPU GPU
Where S sur denotes echo beams, V is the reference : From GPU to CPU

: CPU processing

subspace matrix constructing by the reference signal, i.e. direct : GPU processing

signal and Serr stands for the remaining echo signal. Workstation

The ARD processing, also known as matched filtering, is Fig.3. Diagram of the signal processing of the proposed PRS
calculated as follows.
Echo Reference
L 1 signal signal Amplitude

 (l  r )e j 2 f d l / N
* compensations
 (r , f d )  serr sref (2)
Sub-matrix
l 0 division by range
CS && ARD
Where (r, fd) denotes the range cell and Doppler cell of Sub-matrix1 Sub-matrix2
interest. (near section) (far section)
R-D
Sorting the sub-matrix Sorting the sub-matrix
Next, a modified CA-CFAR method is proposed to address matrix
by almlitude along by almlitude along
the influence of near remaining clutters on detecting targets, range channels range channels

which is described in Fig.4. Amplitude

corrections
Retaining the maximum Retaining the maximum
x points in amplitude for y points in amplitude for
each range channel each range channel
Following the target detection, all the R-D measurements
obtained by the already-processed FM signals are collected Constructing Constructing
one-dimensional array one-dimensional array
together and the multi-static time difference of arrival N
> threshold ? Setting 0
algorithm is employed to locate targets from the measurements. Sorting the array
by amplitude
Sorting the array
by amplitude
Y
Among the above steps, the DMI, R-D processing and Retaining the Retaining the
modified target detection of up to eight FM signals are fully Retaining CA-CFAR maximum p points maximum q points

mapped on GPUs to implement, and the last step, i.e., target

localization, is realized on multi-core CPUs. Limited by the Results output
space, more details about the implementations of the signal
processing of the proposed system, the interested readers can
Fig.4. Diagram of the modified target detection method
refer to [1].

III. MEASUREMENT RESULTS

Fig.2. FM-based multi-frequency passive radar
A. Simulations
1) Accuracy of the GPU implementation
The accuracy of GPU implementation is first verified. Here,
the GPU used in the simulation is NVIDIA Tesla C2075, and
the CPU is Intel Xeon E5-2620. The CPU implementation
coding with MATLAB is regarded as the standard results.
Three targets are simulated in the target echo beam. The
result after the detection is a M×N matrix, and it is then
"flattened" column by column into a vector of M×N elements,
so that we can verify the differences in a visual representation.
The relative errors of the GPU implementation and the CPU
implementation are shown in Fig.5. It can be seen that the

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relative errors such as about 5.3×10-6, 1.0×10-4, 1.1×10-4 for
Target1, Target2, Target3, respectively, are comparable with or
less than the order of 10-4, meeting the needs of practical
applications.

Fig.6. Average running time of different implementations

TABLE I. SPEEDUPS
Fig.5. Relative errors of the GPU implementation and the CPU implementation
Standard platform and Speedups
2) Efficiency of the GPU implementation Speedups
# Standard
To learn more about the efficiency of the GPU platform
(#/standard
implementation, we took the processing of a beam signal as an platform)
example to evaluate the speedups of the GPU implementation CPU1 275.9
versions with respect to other ones.
CPU2 204.6
For the processing of a given beam signal, Fig.6 plots the CPU3 152.0
average running time of eight different versions (four CPU
versions and four GPU versions). Table I lists the speedups of CPU4 GPU4 146.9
standard version represented by GPU4 in Fig.6 compared with GPU1 15.8
other seven versions. From Fig.6 and Table I, we can see that
the maximum speedup can be up to 275.9 times, compared GPU2 14.8
with multicore CPU. The main reason is that massive threads GPU3 4.0
can be launched in parallel on GPU, while the number of CPU
threads (core number) limits the execution efficiency.
Further, the overall efficiency of the GPU implementations
for multiple FM signals is also tested and the corresponding
results are given in Fig.7. From Fig.7, within 1s, C2075 can
deal with two FM signals while this number is four for K20C
and K40.

B. Real data processing

The outfield experiments were conducted using local FM
broadcasts in Hubei province. Fig.8 shows the geometrical
configuration. A total of four FM signals at different locations
contributed to the experiment. In the experiment, we focused
on the take-off and landing airliners from Wuhan Airport. Fig.7. Time results of GPU implementations for multiple FM signals
Figure 9 depicts the detection results of a frame real data by
the proposed method and tradition one, respectively.
Intuitively speaking, the proposed target detection method can
effectively mitigate the unavoidable problem brought by near-
range remaining clutters and decrease the losses of real targets.
Furthermore, Fig.10 shows the comparisons of one group of
tracks measured by our multi-frequency PRS with the
automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) : FM illuminators

reference tracks. From Fig.10, it can be roughly seen that the : Radar receiver

: Wuhan airport
multi-frequency PRS can detect the aerial targets which are up
to about 200km away from the radar receiver. On the other
hand, the average localization accuracy of the filtered tracks is
less than 500m. Fig.8. Geometrical configuration of the outfield experiments

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 IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, the basic outlines of a FM-based multi-
frequency PRS is described. The main considerations of the
design and implementation of the PRS is based on the
principles of software radar. The proposed system has the
advantages of low-cost, easy to debug, small-scale hardware
and easy to be transferred or extended. At last, a small part of
representative experimental results are shared. Currently, the
refinement of the proposed system as well as the combinations
of FM with other illuminators such as digital video
broadcasting-territorial (DVB-T) is our ongoing work.

(a) Results detected by the proposed method

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers
for their valuable comments and advice.

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Fig.9. Result comparisons of the proposed method and traditional one
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Fig.10. Comparisons of the filtered tracks with ADS-B tracks

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