New time-frequency techniques for identification and extraction of scattering mechanisms

Many scatterers such as cavities, jet engines, antennas, appendages on large vehicles and small perturbations in an otherwise homogenous medium are best characterized by distinct higher order scattering phenomena. Their scattering contributions can have significant influence on the overall scattering of the structure and may also contain unique attributes/features that can be exploited for various post-processing functions. Available radar imaging methods based on SAR and traditional time-frequency methods do not possess the necessary resolution needed to extract features in some cases. The authors introduce the adaptive optimal kernel spectrogram approach and discuss higher order mechanisms.