An approach to ground moving target indication (GMTI) using multiple resolutions of the clutter covariance matrix

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to simultaneous ground moving target indication (GMTI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging that promises to outperform current space-time adaptive processing (STAP) GMTI techniques when jamming is not present. An inherent weakness in STAP is its inability to directly estimate the scattering statistics from nonmoving objects in the region under test. A SAR image is a measure of the scattering intensity from an illuminated area on Earth assuming everything in the scene is stationary; therefore, it provides the estimate of scattering from nonmoving targets required for GMTI. Since the homogeneity of the scattering statistics over the scene are unknown, using multiple spatial resolutions of the SAR image to estimate the scattering statistics results in more confidence in the final detection decision.