Signal Processing and Exploitation for High-Dimensional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)

We seek to address limitations of conventional 2D SAR imaging by investigating a new class of 3D imaging techniques that exploit the complicated non-planar relative rotation between a target and radar system. The proposed technique builds upon fundamental work on invariants from range-dependent signals, the basic ideas for which have been developed recently, and in the proposed research will be employed in practical 3D imaging of targets of interest to the Air Force. The principal objectives of Phase I are to (i) develop, implement, test, and analyze monostatic enhanced 3-D target reconstruction; (ii) perform optimization of the 3-D reconstruction; and (iii) develop 3D matching techniques for finding correspondence between 3-D sensed target representations and articulateable CAD models and associated scattering-center databases. By exploiting the complex motion of targets and sensors with respect to one another, the 3D imaging products from the proposed research offer the potential to significantly advance ATR technology. The proposed research will develop the 3D imaging technology, as well as the ATR framework with which such may be exploited by the Warfigher.