SBIR-STTR Award

The goal of this project is to define and pursue novel ISAR-based coherent processing techniques to advance discrimination techniques and improve the performance of NMD radars against the emerging C2 and C3 threats. Essex plans to augment traditional ISAR processing capabilities by extending the resolution and bandwidth via coherent combination of ISAR multi-band, multi-platform, and multi-static phase history data. The coherent combination of multiple radar transmitters and receivers is ideally suited to a cooperative use of radar assets within the NMD system. These techniques have the potential to improve image resolution, image quality, enable three-dimensional (3-D) target rendering and significantly mitigate undesirable clutter such as chaff, decoys, and penetration aids. At the same time, the algorithms presented here could have profound impact for reducing the size of phase array antenna, reducing the instantaneous radar bandwidth without sacrificing resolution, offering improved anti-jamming immunity, and ultimately reducing cost without sacrificing capability. It potentially reduces ambiguities and provides greater sensitivity and it directly leads to a formulation for 3-D ISAR rendering. All of these benefits are enabled by leveraging the geometry of the radar assets to extend the spatial resolution by collecting data as a unified sensor array.

The missile discrimination problem requires rapid target discrimination precisely locating the reentry vehicle (RV) within a ballistic cloud consisting of RVs, decoys, debris, clutter, and countermeasures. The Phase-I study demonstrated that a Volumetric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (VISAR) processing approach combined with a distribute radar collection system offers a significant improvement in solving this discrimination problem. The RV can be identified within a three-dimensional image volume computed from multiple radar collection centers with improved accuracy and clutter mitigation. Conventional radar collections from related efforts have shown an essential improvement in clutter mitigation and target discrimination when Volumetric SAR processing techniques are applied. In this phase-II effort, we propose a development of the VISAR algorithms into a RadarWorkbenchTM. We also propose to conduct a data collection task to evaluate distributed radar concepts and processing approaches. This proposal leverages related SBIR results to assemble a RadarWorkbench with the algorithms to register radar data into coherent volumetric ISAR images. To evaluate the performance of the system, we will plan and conduct a distributed radar data collection, with AFRL and NRL. The RadarWorkbenchTM volumetric processing system will be installed on a processing cluster at SMDC Huntsville

Keywords:
radar imaging, discrimination, isar, multi-static radar