WiFi-Based Passive ISAR for High-Resolution Cross-Range Profiling of Moving Targets

This paper presents an effective signal processing scheme to track moving vehicles and to obtain their cross-range profiles with a passive bistatic radar (PBR) based on the signals of opportunity emitted by a WiFi router. While the target detection using WiFi-based PBR has already been studied by the authors, this paper focuses on the targets moving with a low radial velocity component. These are especially interesting since they might have a reasonable cross-range velocity component, which allows us to apply inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) techniques to provide a high-resolution cross-range profile. A specific problem for these targets is the presence of possibly strong echoes from the stationary background (clutter), which tend to mask their contributions. In such cases, the standard Doppler processing does not help in separating the targets from this clutter. Therefore, appropriate clutter cancellation schemes are applied, and their effectiveness and impact are analyzed both on the tracking and on the ISAR profiling. An appropriate ISAR scheme for cross-range profiling is introduced, tailored for the typical short-range and possibly bistatic surveillance scenarios of the WiFi-based PBR; this scheme comprises the automatic estimation from the data of the target motion components up to a higher order than in usual long-range imaging and their compensation. The reliability of the obtained profiles is also investigated, for both the monostatic and bistatic cases, which is essential both for the vehicle size/characteristics estimation and for the automatic recognition schemes based on vehicle databases. The results obtained using an experimental setup developed and fielded at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Rome, Italy, show that the considered approach is effective and that the obtained cross-range profiles achieved by ISAR processing with WiFi-based passive radar are quite reliable both in the monostatic and bistatic cases.