A Synergistic MIMO SAR and GMTI Approach to Continuous Ground Moving Target Surveillance

Enormous efforts have been devoted to the data acquisition, signal processing, and automatic recognition of stationary or moving targets. However, the move-stop-move ground targets are much more difficult to detect and localize since the detection of such challenging targets may require multiple radar systems, making system integration a challenging problem. Moreover, multidimensional situation awareness of the battlefield requires the coverage of large regions, known as wide area surveillance. There is a significant need to develop sensor platforms that allow synergistic SAR and GMTI for the detection, tracking, localization and recognition all types of targets over a wide area. The main objective of this program is to develop a synergistic multi-input multi-output (MIMO) SAR and GMTI radar system for wide area surveillance. The goal of this objective is to address the following technical issues for the MIMO radar system: probing waveform synthesis, receive filter design for SAR imaging, STAP for GMTI, as well as the simultaneous detection, tracking, localization and recognition of stationary, moving, move-stop-move targets. The secondary objective is to develop, test and deliver a software-based simulation capability that realistically simulates the MIMO SAR and GMTI radar sensor, target, clutter and interference environment.