Guidance Research

The use of a new radar signal processing technology is proposed for the identification of ground vehicles in SAR imagery. This technology was originally developed for aircraft identificaiton, and has proven to be highly successful in that application. It should be straightforward to extend it to the identification of ground vehicles. Since our technology utilizes the amplitude and phase in the image, it is capable of extracting much more information about potential targets than the conventional methods based on just amplitude. In fact, most of the useful information about a target is in the phase, which is usually discarded. Processing the phase is very difficult, however, we have managed to fully automate the algorithms for aircraft identification.During Phase I we will also focus on the limitations inherent in missileborne radars, in particular the fact that some crossrange resolution is needed for imaging. This means that the missile cannot fly directly at the target while the radar is imaging.