Tracking of ground targets with bistatic airborne radar

Detection of moving targets in stationary clutter can be accomplished by STAP radar. In contrast to monostatic radar the performance of bistatic STAP depends strongly on the actual radar-target geometry. Even for sidelooking radar the clutter Doppler is generally range dependent which causes special problems in estimating the space-time clutter covariance matrix. For certain bistatic constellations clutter notches as appearing during track (i.e. areas of low probability of detection) may be considerably wider than in monostatic radar. The bistatic transmitter-receiver constellation has strong implications on ground moving target tracking, which is basic for producing a recognized ground picture as well as for analyzing traffic flows, identifying sources and sinks of traffic, or detecting lines of communication. Aspects of a bistatic GMTI tracking algorithm are described and some typical tracking results are given. Special emphasis is placed on a suitable modeling of the bistatic radar characteristics within the tracker.