Preliminary comparison of high-range resolution signatures of moving and stationary ground vehicles

High-Range Resolution (HRR) radar modes have become increasingly important in the past few years due to the ability to form focused range profiles of moving targets with enhanced target-to-clutter ratios via Doppler filtering and/or clutter cancellation. To date, much research has been performed on using HRR radar profiles of both moving and stationary ground targets for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and Feature-Aided Tracking (FAT) applications. However, little work evaluating the correlation between moving versus stationary HRR profiles has been reported. This paper presents analytical comparisons between HRR profiles generated from a moving vehicle and profiles formed from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of the identical stationary vehicle. The moving target HRR profiles are formed by integrating range-Doppler target images detected from clutter suppressed phase history data. The stationary target HRR profiles are formed from SAR imagery target chips by segmenting the target from clutter and reversing the image formation process. The purpose of this research is to identify which features, such as profile peaks, peak intensity, electrical length, among others, are common to profiles of the same target type and class and at the same imaging geometry.