A Novel Microwave Staring Correlated Radar Imaging Method Based on Bi-Static Radar System

Abstract

The stochastic characteristic of the radiation field of a mono-static microwave staring correlated imaging (MSCI) radar degenerates with the increase of the imaging distance, which results in degradation of the image quality. To address this issue, a novel MSCI method based on bi-static radar is proposed from two perspectives: site-deploying and waveform design. On the one hand, a new bi-static MSCI site-deploying scheme is proposed which adopts two transmitting stations with their azimuth angles relative to the center of the imaging region differing by 90 degrees. On the other hand, by using two transmitting arrays synchronously transmitting inner-and-inter pulse frequency hopping (IAIP-FH) signals, the radiation field of each station includes a few “frequency stripes” perpendicular to the radiation direction, and as a consequence, the “frequency stripes” of each radiation field are perpendicular to each other. As a result, the radiation field of the bi-static MSCI is the superposition of the two striped radiation fields, thus a latticed radiation field is constructed. Therefore, the targets in different latticed grids scatter independent fields, then, the images can be reconstructed using correlation process (CP) algorithms. The grid size of the latticed radiation field is determined by the inner-pulse frequency hopping (FH) interval of the IAIP-FH signals and the imaging geometry. Moreover, it is shown that the 3 dB beam width of the space correlation function of the radiation field does not change with the imaging distance, thus the stochastic characteristic of the radiation field is partly preserved when the imaging distance increases. Simulation results validate the analysis and show that the proposed method can obtain higher resolution images than the common mono-static MSCI method.

Sparse Self-Calibration for Microwave Staring Correlated Imaging With Random Phase Errors

“…where γ n is computed by Eq. (14) with the value of α in the previous iteration. For detailed derivations, readers can refer to [29].…”

“…Waveform design is one of the main research areas in MSCI [7,[9][10][11][12][13][14]. The frequency-hopping (FH) waveforms are mostly studied given that FH waveforms are easy to generate and control by traditional radar hardwares [7,9,11,12].…”

“…Unfortunately, modeling errors always exist in MSCI systems, such as phase errors, gain errors, and synchronization Figure 1. Imaging procedure of microwave staring correlated imaging (MSCI) [14].…”

Microwave Staring Correlated Imaging Method Based on Steady Radiation Fields Sequence

“…Temporal-Spatial Distribution Entropy (TSDE) was proposed in [25] as the optimization target of the joint design of waveform parameters and array configuration. A novel bistatic MSCI architecture was presented in [26] to observe the targets from larger aspect angles and to form TSSRF with better stochastic feature. Arrays with special electronic materials have also been investigated for example, a reflective metasurface was used in MSCI to achieve the random radiation fields [27].…”

Microwave Staring Correlated Imaging Based on Unsteady Aerostat Platform

“…By correlation process (CP) between the target scattering echo and the TSSRF, targets within the antenna beam can be resolved. Due to its superior imaging performance without target relative motion, MSCI has attracted increasing attention and made progress in many aspects such as random radiation source optimization [9,10,11], imaging algorithm [12,13,14] and outfield imaging experiment [15].…”