Baseband version of the bat-inspired spectrogram correlation and transformation receiver

Abstract

Echolocating bats have evolved an excellent ability to detect and discriminate targets in highly challenging environments. They have had more than 50 million years of evolution to optimise their echolocation system with respect to their surrounding environment. Behavioural experiments have shown their exceptional ability to detect and classify targets even in highly cluttered surroundings. The way bats process signals is not exactly the same as in radar and hence it can be useful to investigate the differences. The Spectrogram Correlation And Transformation receiver (SCAT) is an existing model of the bat auditory system that takes into account the physiology and underlying neural organisation in bats which emit chirped signals. In this paper, we propose a baseband receiver equivalent to the SCAT. This will allow biologically inspired signal processing to be applied to radar baseband signals. It will also enable further theoretical analysis of the key concepts, advantages and limitations of the bat signal processing for the purpose of target detection, localisation and resolution. The equivalence is demonstrated by comparing the output of the original SCAT to that of our proposed baseband version using both simulated and experimental target echoes. Results show that the baseband receiver provides compatible frequency interference pattern for two closely located scatterers