Bistatic SAR ATR

TL;DR

This paper investigates the feasibility of automatic target recognition in bistatic radar systems, demonstrating promising results with simulated data and introducing a new robust ATR algorithm suitable for bistatic configurations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of bistatic ATR performance, showing it is comparable to monostatic ATR and introduces a new fast, robust ATR algorithm for bistatic radar.

Findings

Bistatic ATR performs fairly well, not significantly worse than monostatic ATR.

ATR performance remains stable with increasing bistatic angle.

Polarimetric data from bistatic scattering contain distinct, useful information.

Abstract

With the present revival of interest in bistatic radar systems, research in that area has gained momentum. Given some of the strategic advantages for a bistatic configuration, and tech- nological advances in the past few years, large-scale implementation of the bistatic systems is a scope for the near future. If the bistatic systems are to replace the monostatic systems (at least par- tially), then all the existing usages of a monostatic system should be manageable in a bistatic system. A detailed investigation of the possibilities of an automatic target recognition (ATR) facil- ity in a bistatic radar system is presented. Because of the lack of data, experiments were carried out on simulated data. Still, the results are positive and make a positive case for the introduction of the bistatic configuration. First, it was found that, contrary to the popular expectation that the bistatic ATR performance might be substantially worse than the monostatic ATR performance, the bistatic ATR performed fairly well (though not better than the monostatic ATR). Second, the ATR per- formance does not deteriorate substantially with increasing bistatic angle. Last, the polarimetric data from bistatic scattering were found to have distinct information, contrary to expert opinions. Along with these results, suggestions were also made about how to stabilise the bistatic-ATR per- formance with changing bistatic angle. Finally, a new fast and robust ATR algorithm (developed in the present work) has been presented.