Welcome to Hardtarget’s documentation!

Note

This project is under development.

Release

0.5.1

Date

Nov 07, 2024

Introduction

The Hardtarget library contains a set of tools used to detect and characterize coherent echoes in raw (complex amplitude-level) data from a radar. At the heart of the library are routines for implementing a generalised match filter (GMF) which is used to detect targets with a quadratic phase behaviour.

The library is used for detections of meteors in atmospheric radar data, and for detecting resident space objects (RSOs) such as satellites and space debris with ground-based radars.

The library operates on level 2 beamformed data streams that are stored on disk in Digital RF format. The program assumes that there is a complex baseband recording of the transmit waveform and the received complex voltage containing the radar echoes. The program can be adapted to various different radars and radar experiment parameters. This is done by editing a configuration file. An example configuration file is shown below. The example file includes comments that describe each parameter.

If there is an available CUDA compiler in the environment, then both a CUDA library and a C library will be compiled. If no CUDA compiler is found, then only the C code will be compiled.

There is also an end-to-end test, which includes a raw voltage simulator that creates a dataset and analyzes it. This can be used to test the performance of the analysis program and to validate the results. This also includes use of an additional refinement step that is used to refine the detected targets:

Quick install

To install, ensure dependencies gcc, libfftw3-dev, and libhdf5-dev are installed for the C implementations and/or cuda for the GPU implementations. Then install with

pip install hardtarget

or the nightly build

git clone --branch develop git@github.com:danielk333/hardtarget.git
cd hardtarget
pip install .

Read the CLI description

hardtarget -h

History

The hardtarget library has grown out of research and developments by several scientists in diverse fields, over some time.

EISCAT/IRF observations of meteors since 1994 or thereabouts.

First EISCAT observations of space debris (2000-2001)

ESA space debris projects SGO, IRF, UiT, NORCE (2000-2024)

Getting Help

If you have questions about using Hardtarget please open a GitHub Issue or email the Hardtarget developers.

Acknowledgements

SGO, IRF, UiT, NORCE, IKS, ESA, EISCAT

  • ESOC Contract No. 13945/99/D/CD, 2002.

  • ESOC Contract No. 16646/02/D/HK(CS), 2005.

Indices and tables