Imaging of commercial aircraft by inverse synthetic aperture radar and their classification in a Near-Range Radar Network (NRN)

The Near-Range Radar Network is a sensor for the surveillance of the ground traffic on airports. It localizes targets, evaluates the vectors of velocity and classifies the targets. For the latter task microwave images of the moving objects obtained by the principle of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) are utilized. The most important processing steps are the range alignment and the pre-phase compensation of the measured range profiles, which are accomplished by a Hough transform algorithm and an autofocusing technique, respectively. For the final classification projections of the pixel intensities onto two orthogonal axes are extracted and evaluated by a correlator.