WiFi-based passive ISAR for high resolution cross-range profiling of moving targets

Abstract:
The application of Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) techniques to WiFi-based passive radar is investigated in this paper with the purpose of obtaining high resolution cross-range profiling of moving targets. It is firstly shown that the ISAR processing must follow the typical disturbance cancellation stage required in passive radar to remove undesired contributions from the stationary scene which are likely to mask the target returns. Thus the attention is focused on the analysis of the impact of the disturbance cancellation stage on both the autofocus (i.e. the target motion parameters estimation) and the target profiling stages. An effective cancellation strategy is introduced to cope with the target signal distortion at the output of the cancellation stage which might be responsible of severe target profile degradation. The reported experimental results show that the proposed technique allows an effective removal of the undesired contributions while preserving the quality of the target crossrange profile.