Environmentally-Driven Signal Processing Technology for Overland Height Finding

Existing techniques for overland height finding against slow, low-flying air targets may not be compatible with the antenna configurations of emerging and future airborne surveillance radar systems. For example, both monopulse and space-time adaptive processing (STAP) have traditionally been based on monolithic, planar arrays, rather than on the conformal arrays of Sensor Craft or the sparse, volume arrays formed by a cluster of microsatellites or small UAVs. Additionally, existing techniques have failed to exploit the interaction of the target with its electromagnetic environment by incorporating auxiliary sources of knowledge such as DTED and LU/LC. Terrain exploitation, Prony's method of array processing, and stereoscopic radar processing are three new and innovative concepts that overcome many of the limitations of more traditional overland height-finding methods. These techniques were shown to be feasible during the Phase I effort. To facilitate the transition of these techniques into operational and future air surveillance systems, the Phase II effort will demonstrate and minimize the sensitivity of the three height-finding techniques to real-world effects, including errors in the environmental knowledge that is being exploited. The final sensitivities will be used to prepare hardware and software specifications for the algorithms. Specific air surveillance systems with which the techniques are compatible will be identified. The techniques will be optimized for these systems and performance will be validated by processing sets of high fidelity synthetic data, which will be used in lieu of recorded radar data.