Enhanced Aircraft Non-Cooperative Target Recognition

This proposal outlines tasks and deliverables in order to assess the usefulness of full-polarization scattering matrices to discriminate aircraft with similar physical characteristics. Specifically, this work will address air-to-air collection scenarios where the target of interest is non-cooperative. The ability to collect full-polarization returns in air-to-air systems is a recent advancement. Full-polarization scattering matrices offer more information, and potentially more discriminatory information to improve non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) capabilities. This effort will compare the discriminatory capabilities of traditional single-polarization scattering matrices to full-polarization scattering matrices to understand when full-polarization can improve performance, as well as any computational resource trade-offs associated with leveraging full-polarization over single-polarization. Given that the targets of interest will be non-cooperative and non-stable, signatures of the targets will be generated with inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR)  simulation code. In addition to an empirical study on the discriminatory benefit of full-polarization scattering matrices, code and data products will be developed in order to enable reproducibility of the results as well as enable future work.