News Description

Capt Virginie Kubica, Dr Ir,  kindly invites your to the public presentation of her PhD thesis entitled

Opportunistic radar imaging using a multichannel receiver

When? Wednesday May 25th at 15h00

Where? Symposium room, building I, Royal Military Academy, Rue Hobbemastraat 8, 1000 Brussels,

This thesis is the fruit of a cotutelle agreement between the Royal Military Academy and the University College London.

Abstract

A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a sidelooking radar system used to produce a radar image of the observed area. The transmitter and the receiver may be separated, in which case the configuration is called bistatic. In this work, the emissions of existing SAR satellites are exploited by a stationary receiver-only system deployed in the field to produce a local radar image in (near) real-time. In addition to the advantages of reduced procurement and maintenance costs, the receiving system can sense passively while remaining covert yielding increased survivability and robustness against jamming. Applications of such a system include small-scale all-weather area surveillance, change detection,...

Modern SAR systems usually operate in complex scanning modes that illuminate a wide area and result in a low cross-range resolution. In this thesis, a novel SAR image synthesis method is proposed to exploit those complex radar modes in a bistatic configuration to produce radar images with a 5-fold increase in cross-range resolution. Signals from any radar satellite in the receiving band of the passive receiver can be used, thus increasing the refresh rate of high cross-range resolution images over the area of interest. The proposed method is demonstrated using real measurements from C-band satellites such as RADARSAT-2 and European Space Agency's satellites ERS-2, ENVISAT, Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B. In addition, this thesis analyses the main technological issues in bistatic SAR such as the azimuth-variant characteristic of bistatic data and the effect of imperfect synchronisation between the non-cooperative transmitter and the developed receiver.

The military deployment of such a radar would offer a number of operational advantages, such as invisibility to the enemy and better timeliness than would be the case of images obtained via the spaceborne SAR system.

Practical information :

• For logistical reasons, please confirm your participation to Virginie.kubica@rma.ac.be, not later than May 16th
• Directions to reach RMA are provided here