Validating multipath responses of moving targets through urban environments

This work proceeds from the paper we published in RadarCon 2009 titled “Multistatic scattering from moving targets in multipath environments”, where we explored the potential to track moving ground targets with radar as they enter urban areas and become obscured by buildings. An X-band radar data collection was performed which validates the predicted multipath response, and the received multipath power in relation to the line-of-sight (LOS) response. Results from a bistatic experiment are used to examine the spatial coherency of energy reflecting from a large, rough surface, and the power distribution in angle that illuminates a target as it traverses in front of a building. This experiment may inspire knowledge-based methods to coherently process multipath returns, beyond that of standard GMTI processing, i.e., free-space matched-filtering (FFT) and CFAR detection.