Enhanced Detection of Ground Targets by Airborne Radar

Abstract

This dissertation deals with techniques that enhance the detection of ground targets by airborne radar. The methods employed deal with the problem of air to ground detection by breaking the problem into two broad categories. The first category deals with improving detection of moving targets by using space-time adaptive processing (STAP) in a multistatic configuration. Mult-static STAP provides increased detection performance by observing targets from multiple perspectives. Multiple viewing perspectives afford more opportunities to the combined system for observing radial velocity of the target more directly, thus increasing Doppler that helps distinguish the target from background clutter. Detection performance also improves through an increased number of independent observations of a target, which reduces the likelihood of the target fading for the combined system. Increasing detection performance by increasing the number of independent observations is referred to in communications theory as channel diversity. The second part of this dissertation deals with the problem of distinguishing stationary targets from background clutter within a Synthetic Aperture Radar image. Stationary target discrimination is accomplished by exploiting the statistical nature of multifaceted metallic objects within a scene. The performance improvement for both moving and non-moving improvement methods is characterized and compared to other systems that attempt to accomplish the same end using different means.