Holographic 3D ISAR Imaging for Improved Discrimination of Ballistic Targets

The missile discrimination problem requires rapid target discrimination precisely locating the reentry vehicle (RV) within a ballistic cloud consisting of RVs, decoys, debris, clutter, and countermeasures. The Phase-I study demonstrated that a Volumetric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (VISAR) processing approach combined with a distribute radar collection system offers a significant improvement in solving this discrimination problem. The RV can be identified within a three-dimensional image volume computed from multiple radar collection centers with improved accuracy and clutter mitigation. Conventional radar collections from related efforts have shown an essential improvement in clutter mitigation and target discrimination when Volumetric SAR processing techniques are applied. In this phase-II effort, we propose a development of the VISAR algorithms into a RadarWorkbenchTM. We also propose to conduct a data collection task to evaluate distributed radar concepts and processing approaches. This proposal leverages related SBIR results to assemble a RadarWorkbench with the algorithms to register radar data into coherent volumetric ISAR images. To evaluate the performance of the system, we will plan and conduct a distributed radar data collection, with AFRL and NRL. The RadarWorkbenchTM volumetric processing system will be installed on a processing cluster at SMDC Huntsville.