Coherent Change Detection for Predictive Battlespace Awareness: Ground Moving Target Identification (GMTI) Forensics

The SET Team proposes to develop advanced GMTI architectures and processing techniques that effectively exploit the diverse information collected by persistent, staring airborne multi-channel synthetic aperture radar systems towards the goal of detecting and tracking people and vehicles in challenging urban environments. The staring multi-channel SAR system continuously orbits a fixed region of interest and collects wide-area spot-mode radar data with a small number of receiver channels. The wide-beam SAR receivers each record clutter responses over a large Doppler spread so that moving targets of interest are typically endoclutter. The SET design will use multi-channel space-time processing to suppress clutter and simultaneously identify range and bearing to a target; thereby breaking the bearing/velocity ambiguity seen by single channel systems. Furthermore, data collected over multiple orbits of the staring sensor will be used to cancel correlated clutter; simplifying the clutter environment and enabling zero MDV target detection. The SET design will reflect constraints imposed by current/future processors and air-to-ground data links and will support forensic analysis of the radar observables to recognize activities leading up to designated trigger events. BENEFIT: The capability to track vehicles and people in difficult urban terrain and in day/night conditions is critically needed to support oversea, border, and homeland operations in the Global War on Terror. Wide-area persistent staring sensors are being developed to “see everything all the time”. These sensors produce vast amounts of data that must be mined for information. When events of interest occur, these sensors can be used to track forward in time or forensically back in time to uncover tactics, techniques, procedures, and facilities used by enemy insurgents. Automated tools such as those developed here will be needed to search through and extract information needed by warfighters, and security and law enforcement personnel.