Robustness of LRMR based Passive Radar Imaging to Phase Errors

Abstract:
We present a numerical evaluation of our newly developed passive SAR imaging method for phase error resulting from incorrect antenna location. Our method is based on Low Rank Matrix Recovery (LRMR). The LRMR-based method is an alternative to the widely used time difference-of-arrival (TDOA) based back-projection and overcomes the point target assumption on which TDOA backprojection relies. We form a forward model by correlating measurements between two receivers and observe that this results in a rank-one positive semi-definite unknown operator. Imaging is accomplished by solving a constrained trace minimization problem. Since the iterative procedure is non-linear and difficult to analyze, we consider only a numerical evaluation. We demonstrate that our method out performs TDOA backprojection when forming images of scenes with multiple point targets in the presence of antenna motion error.