Through Strike Battle Damage Assessment using Synthetic Aperture Radar

"We propose novel data-adaptive approaches for processing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) phase history data to automatically assess subtle damage inflicted by small sub-munitions on military ground vehicles. These techniques are designed for a battlefieldscenario in which the ground vehicle under attack is illuminated by a stand-off airborne SAR sensor before, during and after the weapon strike, all in a continuous-dwell collection mode. The technology we propose complements baseline algorithms thatALPHATECH is already developing under DARPA's Real-Time Battle Damage Assessment program. To detect weapon impact, we will use an advanced autoregressive approach to estimate and remove the stationary target skin-line response and then enhance residualsarising from transient oscillations. To help predict overall system performance and identify key design trades, we will also conduct studies to assess the fundamental detectability of the transient signature as a function of sensor parameters (frequencybandwidth, SINR, etc.) and target response (frequency, duration, amplitude, etc.) The goal of this study will be to formulate a radar equation for through-strike BDA. Finally, we will use a new signal processing technique, termed Adaptive BackgroundCancellation (ABC) to localize the target signature changes. We propose a systematic, comprehensive plan to characterize the robustness of the algorithms and to demonstrate a real-time capabili