Novel method of estimating moving target spatial dynamics for radar imaging

The increasing proliferation of mobile missile technology, as well as the adoption of CONOPs that hide launchers between deployments, are driving a need for the capability to identify fleeting targets while they are in motion.   The ongoing war in Ukraine has shown that the capability to identify more conventional targets (e.g., armored vehicles) in motion would also be quite valuable. Radars are essential for these capabilities, as other sensors cannot perform in all weather and light conditions.  Because vehicles move straight the vast majority of the time, but with inadvertent irregular translational and rotational motions, estimation of moving vehicle spatial dynamics is entwined with vehicle identification.  The irregular motions defocus a vehicle’s radar image when the duration is long enough to provide the fine nominal crossrange resolution needed to identify stationary vehicles.   Moving-vehicle images formed over shorter dwells are better focused, but have crossrange resolution too coarse for high-confidence identification.   The Phase I program demonstrated the feasibility of extracting six-degree-of-freedom spatial dynamics of moving targets from radar data, without tracking individual scattering features.  The proposed Phase II program will determine the fidelity with which 6-DOF motion can be extracted; will establish the utility of the extracted 6-DOF motion and the associated 3D structure for vehicle classification and for maintaining track custody via feature-aided-tracking; and will develop prototype software for inclusion in a radar ground station.