A HYBRID OPTICAL CORRELATOR/DIGITAL PROCESSOR FOR TARGET DETECTION AND DISCRIMINATION

摘要

An optical correlator (124) includes an acoustic optical Bragg cell (205) that defects an input laser signal using the received and down-converted LADAR signal (122). An integrating optical detector (126/210) is disposed to receive the optical outputs of the acoustic optical Bragg cell and an optical processor (130/212) analyzes and processes the integrating optical detector data. The integrating optical detector integrates the optical outputs of the Bragg cell over time and the integrating optical detector output is sampled over a sampling period so that target detection is uncorrelated to noise. An integrating optical detector data point that exceeds a predetermined threshold is considered to be a valid detected target and the location of the output of the optical correlator on the integrating optical detector is indicative of the Doppler shift and hence the velocity of the detected target. The time of detection of the target is indicative of the range to the target.