Synthetic Aperture Radar Ground Moving Target Indicator (SAR/GMTI) for Detection, ID, and Tracking, of Moving Targets from Airborne Radar Systems

Over the past decades, AFRL-WPAFB has initiated SAR signal processing programs to better understand  coherent information in SAR imagery for ATR, MTI, CCD. Current effort is intended to further this objective by developing algorithms to detect changes in SAR imagery that are acquired at different time points. We plan to address the general problem of change detection in delta-heading multi-pass nonlinear SAR imagery that correspond to different slant planes of an interrogated scene; as a result one SAR image is a spatially-warped version of other SAR images, and their Doppler data are not identical. Our objective is to spatially and spectrally register these imagery such that a coherent processing of the resultant spatially and spectrally registered imagery could be exploited to detect subtle targets such as IEDs. Our approach is based on utilizing an accurate wavefront reconstruction algorithm that is capable of spatially-varying motion compensation using INS data, and forming coherent ground UTM images for multiple SAR databases; this results in spatially-registered imagery. Next, INS data are exploited for spectral registration of ground plane imagery. An adaptive filter is used to calibrate the multi-pass images with respect to the unknown phase, motion errors and variations of the SAR system electronics. BENEFIT: The anticipated result from successful completion of this project will be a set of innovative SAR signal processing algorithms to detect changes in scenes that are regularly interrogated by surveillance and reconnaissance radar platforms of the Departments of Defense, Homeland, and Justice.