Copyright © 2010 Guillaume Ginolhac et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper deals with the imaging of a moving target using a multifrequency and multistatic radar consisting in one receiver and several narrowband transmitters. Considering two hypotheses about the studied target, we derive two multistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar processors: the first one, which models the target as a set of isotropic points, performs a coherent sum of bistatic images; the second one, which models the target as a set of nonisotropic points, performs an incoherent sum of bistatic images. Numerical simulations are done, which demonstrate the efficiency of the second processor. We also apply both processors to a multistatic passive radar scenario for which the transmitters are FM stations located in a realistic configuration. We study the system performance in terms of resolution and sidelobe levels as a function of the number of transmitters and of the integration time. Both processors are applied to similar complex targets for which the scattered fields are simulated by a numerical electromagnetic code. The resulting multistatic radar images show interesting characteristics that might be used by classification algorithms in future work.