The increasing interest in bistatic and multistatic radar systems is a result of the potential they offer in sectors such as remote sensing, navigation, automatic target recognition and related defence and commercial applications. Advantages of multistatic approaches over conventional monostatic systems include (i) the ability to operate in a covert mode (whereby the receiver may be passive with a relatively close stand off distance to the operational region compared to the transmitter), and (ii) increased survivability employing independent receiver manoeuvring with a reduced receiver cost that incorporate inexpensive passive receive only systems. It is also possible to use multistatic systems to sample 3-dimensional space by receiving returns from appropriate 3-dimensional flightpaths. The diversity realised when the return from one transmitter is observed by several receivers offers enhanced performance. In a multistatic environment an enhanced radar cross section may be observed allowing targets that were not detectable using monostatic systems to be identified. At the other extreme strong targets that might mask other features in monostatic systems (the polyhedral effect) may be significantly reduced using multistatic radars. Signal processing is fundamental to effective radar systems. In monostatic SAR imaging, algorithms such as the RDA, FDA, RMA, CSA have been developed and it is natural to aim to extend these to the multistatic domain. This involves revisiting the assumptions and approximations that are made in the monostatic high-resolution radar domain and which may be no longer valid in the multistatic spotlight domain. In multistatic radars used for extracting microdoppler signatures from moving targets techniques such as the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and wavelets have been utilised. It is expected that alternative high-resolution methods will enable greater informative and more robust microdoppler signatures to be extracted. An important aim of the research proposal is to develop new signal processing techniques and demonstrate how they may be used to significantly improve resolution and focusing capability while reducing noise and/or clutter rejection for bistatic spotlight radar imaging and multistatic microdoppler radar signature extraction..
The following key objectives are identified:
(i) To derive new FrFT based algorithms for bistatic spotlight radar imaging methods (HiBistat), including PFA , RMA and CSA for (a) a stationary transmitter and constant velocity receiver, (b) a constant velocity transmitter and constant velocity receiver and (c) a stationary transmitter and an accelerating receiver
(ii) To develop new short-time fractional Fourier transform (STFrFT) frequency signal representation and EMD based high resolution methods for multistatic radar imaging in order to extract robust microdoppler target signature (HiMicro).
(iii) To develop a Fractional Fourier Transform computational engine that will run on state-of-the-art high performance VLIW DSP/ARM architectures suitable for embedded system designs
(iv) To investigate the comparative performance of the new high-resolution methods using realistic simulated models and real data sets
Project Supervisor
John J. Soraghan received the BEng and the MEngSc. degrees in 1978 and 1982, respectively, both from University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, and the PhD degree in electronic engineering from the University of Southampton, UK, in 1989. His PhD work on Synthetic Aperture Radar Processing was carried out in collaboration with the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, U.K. From 1979 to 1980 he joined Westinghouse Electric Corporation, USA as an electronic engineer working on their TPS43 and TPS64 radar systems. In 1986, he joined the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, as a Lecturer in the Signal Processing Division. He became a Senior Lecturer in 1999, a Reader in 2001, and a Professor in 2003. From 1989 to 1991, he was Manager of the Scottish Transputer Centre, and from 1991 to 1995, he was Manager of the DTI Centre for Parallel Signal Processing. Since 1996, he has been Manager of the Texas Instruments’ DSP Elite Centre in the University. He was Head of the Institute for Communications and Signal Processing from 2005-2007. He currently holds the Texas Instruments Chair in Signal Processing in the Centre of Excellence in Signal and Image Processing (CeSIP) University of Strathclyde. His main research interests include advanced linear and non-linear signal processing theory and algorithms with applications to telecommunications; biomedical; multimedia systems; remote sensing and defence. He has been organiser and Technical Chair for the biannual European DSP in Education and Research Symposium (EDERS) since 2004. He has supervised thirty PhD students to graduation, holds three patents, and has published over 230 papers.
