Synthetic Aperture Radar Approaches for Small Maritime Target Detection and Discrimination

RDRTec Inc. has partnered with JHU/APL to mature, extend, validate, and demonstrate for transition coherent techniques for Small Target Detection and discrimination required for high grazing angle performance. The foundation is RDRTecs real-time Video Synthetic Aperture Radar image formation and exploitation algorithms developed under Phase 1 and their application to the Osprey 30, APS-153, ZPY-3, and ZPY-4 radars. These VSAR exploitation algorithms support both single channel and multi- channel radar systems. In addition, they can be applied to multiple polarization data (Radar Airborne Collision Avoidance SystemRACAS). The VSAR imaging and exploitation toolset is an ongoing upgrade to our Maritime and Overland Classification Aid (MOCA) product that has been integrated with the Ocean Surveillance Initiative (OSI) testbed and successfully demonstrated against the APS-153 radar during the 2014 Shore Test at Point Loma, San Diego. Our VSAR imaging algorithm has been demonstrated against the AFRL GOTCHA data to be greater than 100x more efficient than the standard Fast Backprojection approaches.