Synthetic aperture source localization
Date
2018
Authors
Waddington, Chad, author
Cheney, Margaret, advisor
Pinaud, Oliver, committee member
Mueller, Jennifer, committee member
Given, James, committee member
Yang, Liuqing, committee member
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Abstract
The detection and localization of sources of electromagnetic (EM) radiation has many applications in both civilian and defense communities. The goal of source localization is to identify the geographic position of an emitter of some radiation from measurements of the elds that the source produces. Although the problem has been studied intensively for many decades much work remains to be done. Many state-of-the-art methods require large numbers of sensors and perform poorly or require additional sensors when target emitters transmit highly correlated waveforms. Some methods also require a preprocessing step which attempts to identify regions of the data which come from emitters in the scene before processing the localization algorithm. Additionally, it has been proven that pure Angle of Arrival (AOA) techniques based on current methods are always suboptimal when multiple emitters are present. We present a new source localization technique which employs a cross correlation measure of the Time Dierence of Arrival (TDOA) for signals recorded at two separate platforms, at least one of which is in motion. This data is then backprojected through a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-like process to form an image of the locations of the emitters in a target scene. This method has the advantage of not requiring any a priori knowledge of the number of emitters in the scene. Nor does it rest on an ability to identify regions of the data which come from individual emitters, though if this capability is present it may improve image quality. Additionally we demonstrate that this method is capable of localizing emitters which transmit highly correlated waveforms, though complications arise when several such emitters are present in the scene. We discuss these complications and strategies to mitigate them. Finally we conclude with an overview of our method's performance for various levels of additive noise and lay out a path for advancing study of this new method through future work.
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Subject
synthetic aperture radar
source localization