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As a small technical organization, MARK Resources can respond immediately to its customers' needs. The company has earned a reputation for developing ingenious practical solutions to a wide variety of difficult problems in radar design, simulation, signal processing, and target identification. We would love to hear about your technical problems if they are related to these areas. MARK Resources offers short courses on several topics, including Modern Radar: Principles and Design Tradeoffs, Theory and Application of Complex-Image Analysis, and Radar Target Identification. These are described in detail below. We offer these courses periodically at various sites, and they are also available to those who wish to offer a course at their own facility to a number of personnel. We have taught the courses in North America, Europe, and Asia, to both government and civilian personnel.  For more information about our services, please fill out the comment box below (include your email address or another means of contacting you). MODERN RADAR:   THEORY AND PRACTICE OF   RADAR TARGET IDENTIFICATION At radar wavelengths, different parts of a man-made target backscatter with grossly different intensities. The positions and characteristics of the dominant wave-trapping features are a necessary ingredient for target identification, whereas the low-level background is much like a speckle pattern that is too crude to define feature shapes. Measurement of the properties of the dominant features requires that they be resolved from one another. However, resolution is limited by the available bandwidth and dwell, by target motion, and by the intrinsic dependence on frequency and aspect of the backscattering patterns of such features. These limitations require an extension of conventional radar signal processing, which discards the phase of the processor output and thereby sacrifices half the resolution potential. The irregular shapes of dominant scatterers, as well as a lack of detailed target information, excludes the possibility of basing this extension on mathematical target models. Instead, it must be based on a data-driven decomposition of each complex response into constituent scatterers, both pointlike and extended, that includes measurement uncertainties based on deviations of the response from idealized cases.The conventional imaging process also requires modification. Image quality is so sensitive to irregular target motion that one cannot apply a motion compensation procedure and blindly assume that it has worked satisfactorily, nor arbitrarily specify an imaging interval or a particular crossrange resolution. Rather, one must track individual scatterers in order to select imaging intervals that allow the best resolution of dominant target scatterers from one another, and to determine how to physically interpret crossrange measurements. The details of the scatterer tracking are dictated by the target type and the target motion, which must be determined from the tracking measurements. This requires iterative and adaptive procedures for tracking scatterers and for selecting imaging intervals. This course presents the necessary extensions to conventional radar imaging and signal processing, and explains how they can be used to solve the problem of target identification. It covers the identification of aircraft, ground vehicles, and ships in detail, and includes a briefer description of the identification of missiles, rockets, and satellites. The course concentrates on the radar measurements that provide the inputs for target identification, rather than the comparison of the measurements to a database. It includes both general principles and illustrations of their application, as well as prescriptions for automated adaptive processing.   |
mri@markres.com
Last Modified: Wed Dec 06 18:01:00 2000
Copyright 2000 MARK Resources Inc.
