Emitter subset selection for passive multistatic synthetic aperture radar

This paper combines relevant metrics (signal to noise ratio, ambiguity function integrated sidelobes, effective multistatic resolution area, and contrast ratio) in a multi-objective optimization to select subsets of available emitters for passive multistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Assumed limitations in the number of available receiver channels constrain the optimization to select the best emitter combinations up to a maximum subset size. Analog and digital waveforms are simulated for a scene with twenty-four emitters. The combined metrics are used to rank all combinations of up to four emitters. Results indicate that the proposed ranking successfully differentiates between emitter sets resulting in good images and those sets resulting in poor images. The results also reveal the impact of contrast ratio on image quality.