Echolocating bats have evolved the ability to detect, resolve and discriminate targets in highly challenging environments using biological sonar. The way bats process signals in the receiving auditory system is not the same as that of radar and sonar and hence investigating differences and similarities might provide useful lessons to improve synthetic sensors. The Spectrogram Correlation And Transformation receiver (SCAT) is an existing model of the bat auditory system that takes into account the physiology and the neural organisation of bats that emit broadband signals. In this paper, we present a baseband receiver equivalent to the SCAT that allows an analysis of target echoes at baseband. The Baseband SCAT (BSCT) is used to investigate the output of the bat-auditory model for two closely spaced scatterers and to carry out an analysis of range resolution performance and a comparison with the conventional matched filter. Results firstly show that the BSCT provides improved resolution performance. It is then demonstrated that the output of the BSCT can be obtained with an equivalent matched-filter based receiver. The results are verified with a set of laboratory experiments at radio frequencies in high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).
Echolocating bats show a unique ability to detect, resolve and discriminate targets. The Spectrogram Correlation and Transformation (SCAT) receiver is a model of the Eptesicus fuscus auditory system that presents key signal processing differences compared to radar which may offer useful lessons for improvement. A baseband version of the SCAT is used to investigate advantages and disadvantages of bat-like signal processing against the task of target resolution. The baseband receiver is applied to RF experimental data and results show higher range resolution than the reciprocal of the transmitted bandwidth can be achieved for two closely spaced scatterers.
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