Environmentally Driven Signal Processing Technology for Overland Height Finding

"Existing techniques for overland height finding 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 beenbased on monolithic, planar apertures rather than on the conformal arrays of Sensor Craft or the TechSat 21 sparse array of micro-satellites. Additionally, existing techniques have failed to exploit the interaction of the target with its electromagneticenvironment by incorporating auxiliary sources of knowledge such as DTED and LULC. In the proposed study, TSC will demonstrate the feasibility of three new and innovative height-finding algorithms: 1) a combination of multipath and terrain-maskingexploitation, 2) Prony's method, and 3) stereoscopic processing. All three techniques are inherently dependent on knowledge-aided (KA) signal processing or use auxiliary sources of knowledge to improve algorithm performance. In particular, the firsttechnique exploits the interference pattern between the direct and specular multipath returns from a target that occurs over smooth terrain, and the interrupted detection history of a target that occurs due to masking over rough terrain. All techniqueswill be evaluated to determine their height estimation accuracy and their compatibility with both conventional and unconventional air surveillance systems. The reliable detection and three-dimens