The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has recently upgraded the indoor, rail-mounted synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, RailSAR, to enable collection of large amounts of low-frequency, ultrawideband (UWB) data. Our intent is to provide a research tool that is capable of emulating airborne SAR configuration and associated data collection geometries against surrogate explosive hazard threat deployments. By having such a capability, ARL’s facility will afford a more rapid response to the ever changing improvised characteristics associated with explosive hazards today and in the future. Therefore, upgrades to this RailSAR tool to improve functionality and performance are needed to meet the potential rapid response assessments to be carried out. The new, lighter RailSAR cart puts less strain on the radar positioning hardware and allows the system to move smoothly along a specified portion of the rail. In previous papers, we have presented co-polarized SAR data collected using the ARL RailSAR. Recently, however, researchers at ARL have leveraged this asset to collect polarimetric data against multiple targets. This paper presents the SAR imagery resulting from these experiments and documents characteristics of certain target signatures that should be of interest to developers of automatic target detection (ATD) algorithms.

Date Published: 12 May 2016
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9829, Radar Sensor Technology XX, 98291R (12 May 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2228851

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9829:
Radar Sensor Technology XX
Kenneth I. Ranney; Armin Doerry, Editor(s)