Biograph: Tapan K. Sarkar received the B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1969, the M.Sc.E. degree from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada, in 1971, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, in 1975. From 1975 to 1976, he was with the TACO Division of the General Instruments Corporation. He was with the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, from 1976 to 1985. He was a Research Fellow at the Gordon McKay Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, from 1977 to 1978. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Syracuse University. His current research interests deal with numerical solutions of operator equations arising in electromagnetics and signal processing with application to system design. He has authored or coauthored more than 400 journal articles and numerous conference papers and 32 chapters in books and fifteen books

Dr. Sarkar is a Registered Professional Engineer in the State of New York. He received the College of Engineering Research Award in 1996 and the Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence in Research in 1998 at Syracuse University. He was the 2014 President of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. He is the receipient of the 2020 IEEE Electromagnetics Field Award.

He received Docteur Honoris Causa from Universite Blaise Pascal, Clermont Ferrand, France in 1998, from Politechnic University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain in 2004, and from Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland in 2012. He received the medal of the friend of the city of Clermont Ferrand, France, in 2000.

Title:Use of the Fractional Fourier Transform for radar Target Identification using the Singularity Expansion Method

Abstract: This presentation will discuss the Fractional Fourier Transform for estimating parameters of damped sinusoids utilizing both early and late time transient scattering data contaminated by noise. Transient scattering responses are composed of damped sinusoids at late times and impulse-like components at early times.  Due to the impulse-like components, it is difficult to extract meaningful damped sinusoids.  In this study the entire noisy time domain response is used to extract the signal parameters of interest. The fractional Fourier transform (FrFT), especially the half Fourier transform (HFT) is used to analyze the data for parameter identification. Impulse or Gaussian-like pulses can be easily separated from the damped exponentials in the HFT domain, as they have similar functional representations. Results from several examples show that the new technique is applicable for noisy signals that are composed of damped exponentials and pulse-like components.