Advanced Radar Data Fusion

Accurately acquiring, tracking, discriminating and engaging a missile/warhead amongst closely spaced decoys immersed in clutter is a challenge for one or more radar systems. The objective of this proposal is to optimally design multi-sensor data collection, processing and fusion strategies when multiple radars and/or other sensors are employed to form a single integrated picture of the battlespace. Although the ambiguity function has long been recognized as an invaluable tool for assessing the performance of monostatic radars, it is only recently that extension of the ambiguity function concept to multistatic radars has been considered. The first extension was made to bistatic radars where it was shown that geometry can play a crucial role in the shape of the bistatic ambiguity function when plotted as a function of target range and velocity. More recently, extensions have been proposed for the general case of M receivers and N transmitters. It is proposed herein to fuse multiple receivers by employing the multistatic ambiguity function which enables evaluation of such important performance metrics as detection and false alarm probabilities, target resolution capabilities, target parameter estimation accuracies and clutter rejection.