Radar Imaging

Radar is an established basic tool in diverse applications such as surveillance, border patrol, sensing hazardous material, search and rescue, asset monitoring, agriculture and urban planning.

In all of these applications, the advance of methods to maximize information extraction remains a highly desirable and challenging goal.

The advances and requirements
Recent advances in hardware technology and new radar platforms are enabling a much wider range of design freedoms. At the same time, there are emerging and compelling changes in system requirements such as greater information content, higher sensitivities, and improved tolerance to noise and interference.

Rensselaer's radar program
Our research program includes integrated sensing and imaging where radar's mission, waveform design and image reconstruction are integrated within a systems approach. Our multi-disciplinary approach combines physics-based modeling with statistical techniques and microlocal analysis to address SAR image reconstruction and waveform diversity design problems in the context of radar's mission.

Physics-based modeling approach embraces multipathing; attenuating environments; wide-band, wide-aperture systems; mono- and multi-static measurements; and waveform illumination parameters also including image understanding objectives to the data collection process.

Statistical treatment of microlocal techniques is a novel approach that offers robust and fast image reconstruction algorithms for physics-based models in non-ideal conditions.

Rensselaer's approach extends beyond radar imaging
The fundamental developments of this project are also applicable to a variety of other imaging modalities including sonar, medical ultrasound, non-destructive testing, and seismic prospecting.

Project Members
The faculty leaders for the graduate student cohort in this project
are Birsen Yazici and Margaret Cheney.

Rensselaer Faculty
Margaret Cheney
Birsen Yazici

Postdoc
Trond Varslot

Graduate Students
Matt Ferrara
Evren Yarman

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Inverse Problems Center at Rensselaer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th St., Troy, NY 12180-3590.
(518) 276-2145• E-mail: mclauj3@rpi.edu