Full Text Available

Note: Clicking the button above will open the full text document at the original institutional repository in a new window.

Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques

This dissertation presents a radar signal processing infrastructure implemented on scripting language platforms. The main goal is to determine if any open source scripted packages are appropriate for radar signal processing and if it is worthwhile purchasing the more expensive MATLAB, commonly used...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Frantz, Xavier
Other Authors: O'Hagan, Daniel
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Department of Electrical Engineering 2019
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1867611311493349376
access_status_str Open Access
author Frantz, Xavier
author2 O'Hagan, Daniel
author_browse Frantz, Xavier
O'Hagan, Daniel
author_facet O'Hagan, Daniel
Frantz, Xavier
author_sort Frantz, Xavier
collection Thesis
description This dissertation presents a radar signal processing infrastructure implemented on scripting language platforms. The main goal is to determine if any open source scripted packages are appropriate for radar signal processing and if it is worthwhile purchasing the more expensive MATLAB, commonly used in industry. Some of the most common radar signal processing techniques were considered, such as pulse compression, Doppler processing and adaptive filtering for interference suppression. The scripting languages investigated were the proprietary MATLAB, as well as open source alternatives such as Octave, Scilab, Python and Julia. While the experiments were conducted, it was decided that the implementations should have algorithmic fairness across the various software packages. The first experiment was loop based pulse compression and Doppler processing algorithms, where Julia and Python outperformed the rest. A further analysis was completed by using vectors to index matrices instead of loops, where possible. This saw a significant improvement in all of the languages for Doppler processing implementations. Although Julia performed extremely well in terms of speed, it utilized the most memory for the processing techniques. This was due to its garbage collector not automatically clearing the memory heap when required. The adaptive LMS (least mean squares) filter designs were a different form of analysis, as a vector of data was required instead of a matrix of data. When processing a vector or one dimensional array of data, Julia outperformed the rest of the software packages significantly, approximately a 10 times speed improvement. The experiments indicated that Python performed satisfactorily in terms of speed and memory utilization. Physical RAM of computer systems is, however, constantly improving, which will mitigate the memory issue for Julia. Overall, Julia is the best open source software package to use, as its syntax is similar to MATLAB compared with Python, and it is improving rapidly as Julia developers are constantly updating it. Other disadvantage of Python is that the mathematical signal processing is an add-on realized by modules such as NumPy.
format Thesis
id oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/30160
institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language eng
license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2019
publishDateRange 2019
publishDateSort 2019
publisher Department of Electrical Engineering
publisherStr Department of Electrical Engineering
record_format dspace
source_str UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/30160 Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques Frantz, Xavier O'Hagan, Daniel This dissertation presents a radar signal processing infrastructure implemented on scripting language platforms. The main goal is to determine if any open source scripted packages are appropriate for radar signal processing and if it is worthwhile purchasing the more expensive MATLAB, commonly used in industry. Some of the most common radar signal processing techniques were considered, such as pulse compression, Doppler processing and adaptive filtering for interference suppression. The scripting languages investigated were the proprietary MATLAB, as well as open source alternatives such as Octave, Scilab, Python and Julia. While the experiments were conducted, it was decided that the implementations should have algorithmic fairness across the various software packages. The first experiment was loop based pulse compression and Doppler processing algorithms, where Julia and Python outperformed the rest. A further analysis was completed by using vectors to index matrices instead of loops, where possible. This saw a significant improvement in all of the languages for Doppler processing implementations. Although Julia performed extremely well in terms of speed, it utilized the most memory for the processing techniques. This was due to its garbage collector not automatically clearing the memory heap when required. The adaptive LMS (least mean squares) filter designs were a different form of analysis, as a vector of data was required instead of a matrix of data. When processing a vector or one dimensional array of data, Julia outperformed the rest of the software packages significantly, approximately a 10 times speed improvement. The experiments indicated that Python performed satisfactorily in terms of speed and memory utilization. Physical RAM of computer systems is, however, constantly improving, which will mitigate the memory issue for Julia. Overall, Julia is the best open source software package to use, as its syntax is similar to MATLAB compared with Python, and it is improving rapidly as Julia developers are constantly updating it. Other disadvantage of Python is that the mathematical signal processing is an add-on realized by modules such as NumPy. 2019-05-16T13:23:09Z 2019-05-16T13:23:09Z 2019 2019-05-16T13:14:30Z Master Thesis Masters MSc (Eng) http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30160 eng application/pdf Department of Electrical Engineering Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment
spellingShingle Frantz, Xavier
Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
thesis_degree_str Master's
title Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
title_full Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
title_fullStr Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
title_full_unstemmed Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
title_short Software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
title_sort software packages performance evaluation of basic radar signal processing techniques
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30160
work_keys_str_mv AT frantzxavier softwarepackagesperformanceevaluationofbasicradarsignalprocessingtechniques