Automatic aircraft landing using interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging

This paper presents an interferometric processing of an aircraft's monostatic and bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) signatures for automatic landing. The aircraft's squint angle in this ISAR imaging problem is near 90/spl deg/. We show that this extreme squint angle does not pose any problem for the ISAR Fourier-based (wavefront) reconstruction algorithm. In fact, the aircraft can be imaged accurately, and without any erroneous shifts in the cross-range domain, within the imposed theoretical resolution. Moreover, the algorithm is accurate enough such that one can utilize the phase of the ISAR monostatic and bistatic measurements for interferometric processing. The resultant interferometric ISAR image is used to detect undesirable rotations in the aircraft's orientation.