February Fourier Talks 2008

Synthetic Aperture Hitchhiker Imaging

I will discuss a novel synthetic-aperture imaging method for radar/sonar systems that rely on sources of opportunity. The method involves first correlating the measurements from two different receiver locations. This leads to a Fourier Integral Operator (FIO) that projects the radiance of the target scene onto the intersection of certain hyperboloids with the surface topography. For fixed-frequency sources of opportunity (Doppler waveforms), the method correlates the windowed signal obtained from one receiver location with the scaled and translated version of the signal from another receiver location. In both cases, we use microlocal techniques to invert the resulting FIOs. The inversion leads to a generalized filtered-backprojection-type method to recover the scene radiance. The method is applicable to both stationary and mobile, and cooperative and non-cooperative sources of opportunity. Additionally, it is applicable to non-ideal imaging scenarios such as those involving arbitrary trajectories, and has the desirable property of preserving the visible edges of the scene radiance.