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Asan important means in low-altitude airspace surveillance, passive radar has been widely studied. With the increasing complexity of the low-altitude environment, the urgent need for radar's capability of automatic target recognition (ATR) emerges. In the field of ATR for passive radar, the method based on radar cross section (RCS) is an important direction for the simplicity of feature extraction. In this article, we exploit the compensated quasi-echo-power (CQEP), i.e., quasi-RCS, to realize ATR in passive radar. We propose an ATR method on the basis of the angular diversity. First, we divide the angular space, which consists of four components of the incident angle and scattering angle of electromagnetic wave, into multiple subspaces. Then, we build a subrecognizer in each angular subspace according to the CQEP distribution characteristics. Each receiving station of the multistatic passive radar recognizes targets in an angular subspace corresponding to its observation and outputs a preliminary decision. Based on the preliminary decisions of all receiving stations, a voting strategy is adopted to make the final decision on the unknown target class in the fusion center. Experimental results based on real-life target data show that the proposed method has a significant improvement on the average correct recognition rate with fusion of three receiving stations, which validates the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we review and compare different methods for the localization of an illuminator of opportunity for passive radar systems employing cooperative targets. For assessment and comparison, we use numerical simulations and real-world radar measurements. To achieve reliable operation under real-world conditions, a correct and robust association of the bistatic radar target observations with ground truth information is necessary. We introduce a novel solution to this issue with an efficient preprocessing algorithm based on a planar approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new algorithm for passive bistatic radar (PBR) localization is proposed via joint exploitation of multiple illuminators of opportunity and measurements gathered by a colocated active radar. Ad-hoc constraints within the localization process are bestowed accounting for both a priori information on the PBR receive antenna main-beam size and the uncertainty characterizing active radar data, i.e., the root mean square error (RMSE) of range/bearing measurements. Hence, the estimation task is cast as an elliptic positioning problem, according to the constrained least squares framework. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is globally solved providing a closed-form estimate in Cartesian coordinates. The performance of the proposed estimator, in terms of RMSE, exhibits sensible improvement with respect to counterparts. The proposed technique is also applied to the case of a dynamic scenario for a bi-sensor surveillance system, where the active rotating platform acquires measurements at each scanning period. The results show the localization performance improvement achieved when the system is complemented with a PBR staring in a specific search sector of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the problem of clutter cancelation for slowly moving target detection and localization in multichannel passive radar onboard mobile platforms. A post-Doppler space-time adaptive processing (STAP) approach is exploited in the case of an angle-dependent imbalance affecting the receiving channels. While the clutter suppression capability is ensured by the adaptivity of space-time filtering, different solutions are compared, aimed at recovering the detection performance losses associated with channel calibration errors. A space-time generalized-likelihood ratio test (GLRT) scheme is considered, where the steering vector is not specified in the spatial domain, resulting in a noncoherent integration of target echoes across the receiving channels. This is compared with a fully coherent GLRT scheme where echoes from the stationary scene are exploited for the proper calibration of spatial steering vector mismatch. The first scheme proves to be a simple solution for target detection in the passive radar case, offering comparable clutter cancelation capability. The second scheme, at the expense of an additional stage, offers slightly better detection performance and preserves target direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation capability. Finally, the STAP scheme is employed for the maximum-likelihood estimation of target DoA, evaluating the role of the steering vector calibration against the negative impact of channel imbalance. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is tested against both simulated and experimental data from a DVB-T-based mobile passive radar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through-wall human sensing is of high interest for both military and nonmilitary applications, including counter-terrorism and law enforcement purposes, particularly in the modern, highly urbanized environment. Conventional active radar sensors possess good performance, however, at the expense of high cost and complexity of the transmitter/receiver design. This article demonstrates the effectiveness of a passive through-wall human sensing technique using opportunistic WiFi signals. With a simple software-defined radio receiver and advanced signal processing techniques, the position of indoor WiFi access point can be accurately localized, and its signal can be exploited to clearly detect the Doppler/micro-Doppler of human motions inside the room. Compared to the results in the current literature, this article demonstrates better detection sensitivity and capability to sense not only major motions such as walking and waving hand, but also very small human motions such as keyboard typing and breathing. In addition, an iterative adaptive approach is applied to effectively improve the Doppler resolution of WiFi passive radar. These enhanced sensitivities greatly expand the potential of WiFi passive radar for through-wall sensing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection and tracking performance of passive radar systems can be enhanced by exploiting multiple emitters and one receiver site by allowing for multiple bistatic geometries. This article investigates the measurement accuracy of passive radar systems that employ the advanced television system committee (ATSC 1.0) signal as a signal of opportunity. The monostatic and bistatic modified Cramér–Rao lower bound for the range and velocity measurements are derived as a quantitative way to evaluate the performance variation when exploiting multiple transmitters. The effect of 3D target position on the signal-to-noise ratio, with respect to stationary transmitters and receiver, is highlighted. Furthermore, signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio modeling is included by considering the direct signal interference suppression performance for a set of transmitters. An example in Columbus, Ohio, for a single receiver and multiple digital television transmitters that are spatially distributed is presented to find the optimal emitter that yields the best range and velocity measurement in the analyzed area. Target-tracking experiments show an agreement between the optimal emitter map and the tracking quality for the set of transmitters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various correlation-based receivers have been proposed in passive bistatic and active monostatic radar exploiting orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing communications signals, but too little has been dedicated to establishing their relations and advantages over each other. Accordingly, this article provides an analytical comparison of the common filters in such waveform sharing scenarios, along with a performance analysis regarding three criteria: computational complexity, signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio, and resilience to ground clutter. The last two especially assess the possible detrimental effects of the random sidelobes (or pedestal) induced by the data symbols in the range-Doppler map. Although simulations show that none of the filters performs unanimously better, the ones employing circular correlations globally evidence attractive results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the problem of target detection in a passive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar network involving noncooperative illuminators of opportunity (IOs) and geographically dispersed multichannel receivers. The signal model considers the direct-path interference (DPI). We employ the Rao test to solve the problem and derive a closed-form detector. Then, by considering the properties of the ambiguity functions of most IO waveforms, an approximated version of the detector with a simpler form is derived. Two detectors in the case of an active MIMO network are also provided as the upper bounds of the passive situations. Moreover, considering target echo signal fluctuation, we have analyzed the performance of the detectors in terms of probability of miss-detection when being used in a multistatic configuration and have specified the conditions under which the full diversity gain is achieved. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed detectors and demonstrate that the proposed detectors have performance very close to the active situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In previous works, methods were explored for position estimation utilizing satellite-borne signals of opportunity, mainly the global positioning system (GPS). The GPS signal was exploited for use in a multistatic passive coherent location (PCL) system. The GPS signal is especially attractive for PCL applications because of the native capability to produce position and velocity estimation. This paper examines the signal specifications for PCL implementation and explores the potential limitations of the proposed solutions. GPS specific methods are developed for multistatic PCL velocity estimation in a three-dimensional plane. The method developed is combined with previously completed work of GPS PCL position estimation for a complete system design in range and Doppler. The PCL system is evaluated against conventional GPS position estimation and velocity estimation and proves to have comparable metrics of performance. Analysis and simulation are performed for verification and validation of the developed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint radar-communications dual function has drawn lots of attention since it can make a better use of the scarce wireless frequency resources and expensive hardware platforms. In case of joint radar-communications signal co-use, many communication sequences have poor range sidelobes and thus are not very suitable for the radar function. In this paper, we present a single carrier joint radar-communications method operating in the pulsed radar mode. Digital communication sequences are first partitioned into blocks which are then mapped to digital phase-coded sequences, like binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) sequences. The phases of the digital sequences are perturbed a bit such that certain degrees of freedom are available to optimize for lower range sidelobes. Insignificant phase perturbation will be deemed as phase noise by a communication receiver and then phase codes can be correctly decoded; in radar-processing channels, range compression are performed with known and optimized phase perturbation such that low-range sidelobes are obtained. An implementation scheme is presented. Numerical results with BPSK and QPSK sequences indicate that little phase perturbation can significantly drop the range sidelobe level but will insignificantly rise the bit error rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine an FM-based passive coherent location (PCL) radar system and attempt to quantify its performance in the presence of various different jamming waveforms namely broadband noise and a single tone on the carrier. It is shown that effective jamming can be achieved with relatively low jamming power. The importance of an effective direct signal canceller is also shown as a means of suppressing the jamming signal. The effect of these jamming scenarios is shown through simulation and then compared to a representative measured result from a real FM-based PCL radar system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambiguity function analysis is central to investigating the resolution capabilities of a radar system. It is particularly important for passive radar scenarios, where the signals of opportunity have not been originally designed for radar purposes. This paper focuses on studying the achievable resolution capabilities for a noncoherent orthogonal frequency division-multiplexing (OFDM)-based passive multistatic radar for L-band digital aeronautical communication system (LDACS) signals. For this purpose, the ambiguity function obtained when employing the OFDM-based LDACS communications signals as signals of opportunity is studied. A generic bistatic link is considered and closed-form expressions for the expectation of the corresponding ambiguity function when accounting for the different signal contributions are derived. The resulting expressions are then used to evaluate and analyze the overall multistatic radar ambiguity function for two sample radar scenarios. The results highlight the impact of the geometry on the shape of the ambiguity function, allowing therefore for a better understanding of the effect that the geometry has on the range and velocity resolution capabilities of the studied system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of radar emitters in a naval electronic-warfare (EW) context is a challenging problem. Furthermore, over the last few years, new technologies and the reduction of the fabrication costs have led to an increase in the number of radars. Thus, EW systems need to improve their capabilities of radar identification. The common operational methods, which consist of clustering pulses with similar parameters, are no longer able to solve the classification task efficiently. The main challenges of this data clustering of unknown radar emitters from passive measurements are the high dimension of the received radar pulse samples, the small sample group size, and closely located radar pulse clusters. In this paper, we propose modeling the instantaneous frequency law of the recorded pulses using Bézier curves. The spatial distribution of the control points of the Bézier curves is used as a new feature for the classification process based on the common density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise algorithms. Real data recorded near Brest, France, are used to highlight the interest in using the proposed approach. We also show the potential of the approach for specific emitter identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of forward-scatter radar (FSR) target detection based on the signals of opportunity made available by standard radio and TV broadcast transmission stations. This passive FSR (P-FSR) operation is obtained by means of a simple and robust correlation process based on self-mixing. This is shown to be very effective in extracting the characteristic FSR modulation produced by airborne targets, from the signals received from frequency modulated, digital audio broadcasting, and digital video broadcasting transmitters of opportunity. Target detectability is discussed as a function of the carrier frequency, the target size, and its height at the baseline crossing. Experimental results are shown using a wide variety of sources of opportunity, target types, baselines, and receiver configurations. The target signatures obtained from the different illuminators are compared and ways of extracting the kinematic parameters of the aircraft are discussed. This validates the claimed effectiveness and robustness of the P-FSR with the presented processing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This work focuses on a passive coherent location (PCL) system that exploits the signals emitted by IEEE 802.22 devices, referred hereafter as a white-space PCL (WS-PCL) system. To cope with the very low transmitted equivalent isotropically radiated power of the IEEE 802.22 emitters, we focus on the design of a WS-PCL system that exploits all the useful signals, emitted from both the base station and customer-premises equipment, received in each frame. In this work, we study the feasibility of a WS-PCL system by deriving the receiver operating characteristic and defining the multistatic velocity profiling algorithm for the estimation of the target velocity vector. The performance of the proposed receiver is compared to that of a WS-PCL system that exploits only the signal emitted by the base station. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the analysis of the side peaks in passive radar using digital video broadcasting-terrestrial (DVB-T) signal, two methods for the side peaks interference suppression are presented: the side peaks identification (SPI) method and the side peaks elimination-intersection (SPE-I) method. The SPI method identifies the side peaks by their positions and amplitudes relative to the main peaks. The SPE-I method eliminates the intra-symbol side peaks and the inter-symbol side peaks by preprocessing the reference signal respectively, and obtains the main peaks from the intersection of the peak positions in the two cross-ambiguity function (CAF) diagrams. The SPI method can identify the side peaks without the power loss and may lose the main peaks masked by the side peaks. The SPE-I method can eliminate the side peaks and detect the main peaks masked by the side peaks at the expense of the power loss. Combination of the SPI method and the SPE-I method can overcome their disadvantages. The proposed methods can avoid the false alarms of the side peaks and improve the target detection performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]