Multistatic micro-Doppler radar signatures of personnel targets

This study extends the theory of the micro-Doppler effect into the multistatic domain, and considers how the multistatic micro-Doppler signature (µ-DS) will affect radar automatic target recognition (ATR). Real multistatic µ-DS of personnel targets are examined and their nature compared with theory and simulated results. It is demonstrated that the use of multistatic µ-DSs would increase the robustness of radar ATR systems to the problem of self-occlusion, where the target obscures itself. Redundancy in the multistatic µ-DS is identified, and how this may reduce the data fusion demands of multi-aspect classifiers is discussed. Also, information theory is used to demonstrate that the multistatic µ-DS contains more target information than the monostatic case. This result leads to the prediction that multi-aspect µ-DS-based radar ATR would have improved performance compared to single-aspect solutions.