A Real-Time Statistical Radar Target Model

Radar glint arises from the spatial phase perturbations of the radar signal echoed from a complex target. The glint phenomenon is closely related to the target radar cross section (RCS). This relationship plays a significant part in modern missile seeker signal processing. We present a statistical glint/RCS target model for realtime simulation of target signatures. Particular emphasis is placed upon the modeling and simulation of the appropriate glint/RCS statistical dependency. The fundamental approximation of locating uniformly distributed scatterers around the instantaneous radar centroid employed in the Delano-Gubonin [1, 2, 3] model is removed. A key result which follows from this representation is that the mean glint estimator is unbiased. This enables the estimation of model parameters from the first-order glint and RCS statistics which can easily be computed from measured data. A method of estimating model parameters is presented, and the results are applied to data from a typical combat aircraft target. It is shown that the Delano-Gubonin results are a special case of the results presented here. The 14.6 percent probability of glint falling beyond the target extent as derived by Delano [1] is not true in general. It is further shown that glint and RCS are uncorrelated but are statistically dependent. A Monte-Carlo simulation is performed to verify the assumptions made and to demonstrate the feasibility of the working models.