An Improved Single Flight Technique for Radar Stereo

An improved technique for obtaining stereo radar image pairs is described. The technique uses a unique combination of two different radar beam pattern characteristics. The resulting stereo radar images are illuminated from very nearly the same aircraft position which results in radar shadow and backscatter characteristics which are very similar and in improved image registration possibilities. The reduction in illumination angle and aircraft position differences is shown to be nearly an order of magnitude or more when compared with a previously proposed single flight technique which used two vertical fan beam patterns at different azimuth angles. As a related sidelight it is shown that this previous technique requlres the two fan beam patterns to generate parallax on the images and thus can not be implemented with synthetic arrays squinted at two different squint angles.