Bistatic High Range Resolution Radar Image Processing

Technology Service Corporation (TSC) and our academic partner Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) present an innovative approach to radar imaging of ships and other maritime targets that exploits monostatic, bistatic and multistatic wideband radar signals. The new signal processing technique is applied to the problem of imaging maritime targets using fixed-site surface surveillance radars, to identify traffic that is potentially hostile. The TSC team will develop and evaluate an algorithm that employs monostatic and bistatic wideband, high resolution radar returns to generate image signatures of ship targets. These images can be used to classify maritime traffic and identify potential threats to US Navy assets. In Phase I, TSC and RPI will generate high-fidelity simulated image data and evaluate the improved performance offered by our proposed bistatic radar processing technique when compared with conventional monostatic Inverse Synthetic Aperture (ISAR) radar processing. TSC and RPI propose new signal processing techniques that automatically determine the ship motion state, handle complex ship motions in which scatterers do not move linearly, exploit bistatic radar geometries where the transmitter and receiver are separate, produce multi-aspect images from a single coherent measurement, and allow longer coherent integration to suppress noise and interference.