Passive imaging exploiting multiple scattering using distributed apertures

We develop a new passive image formation method capable of exploiting information about multiple scattering in the environment using measurements from a sparse array of receivers that rely on illumination sources of opportunity. We use a physics-based approach to model wave propagation and develop a statistical model that relates measurements at a given receiver to measurements at other receivers. We formulate the imaging problem as a spatially resolved binary hypothesis testing problem using the model between the measurements at different receivers, statistics of the objects to be imaged and statistics of the additive noise and clutter. We address the spatially resolved hypothesis testing problem by constraining the associated discriminant functional to be linear and by maximizing the signal-to-noise-ratio of the test-statistic, and use the resulting spatially resolved test-statistics to form the image. We present numerical simulations to demonstrate the performance of the passive imaging algorithm.