Airborne Monitoring of Ground Vehicle Motion

We propose to develop the signal processing algorithms to detect and maintain continuous track of ground vehicles with an airborne surveillance radar. Three modes of radar operation are needed to detect and track all targets of interest: a conventional SAR mode for stationary vehicles, a modified SAR mode for slow moving vehicles, and an MTI mode for fast moving vehicles. All modes will be based on the use of high resolution in range. Tracking will be aided by a novel signal processing technology that is capable of recognizing specific targest in a sequence of dwells or images.This novel radar signal processing technology was originally developed for aircraft identification, and has proven to be highly successful in that application. What distinguishes this technollogy is that it is based on an analysis of the complex image, whereas conventional methods utilizes only the image amplitude. It turns out that most of the useful information about a target is in the image phase. During Phase I we plan to demonstrate the potential of the technology by using real radar data.