Abstract:

A passive radar imaging method using distributed apertures capable of operating in multipath environments is studied. First, a signal model of passive radar using distributed apertures is presented, which does not need any information of the transmitter and is applicable to multipath environments. Then, an imaging method based on binary hypothesis testing is investigated where a spatial resolved test statistic is determined according to the signal-to-noise ratio maximization criterion. The resulting image is formed by the test statistic  evaluated at each hypothetical target location. The performance of the imaging method in multipath environments is analyzed in detail, and the digital video broadcast terrestrial signal is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed imaging method in a simulated multipath environment. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the target can be reconstructed correctly using the proposed imaging method and the multipath propagation can be used for the imaging.