Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper focuses on a passive radar system based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems for maritime surveillance. While in the past the capability of this technology to detect ship targets at sea was proved, despite the low EIRP level of the GNSS, the objective of this paper is investigating the potential of the system to extract information concerning the detected target characteristics.

This work investigates the potentialities of DVB-S based passive ISAR for maritime surveillance applications. Specifically, in order to characterize the bound on the achievable performance, a knowledge based approach is adopted: Assuming known the target motion, the image is focused in both the range/Doppler domain and the x-y plane via backprojection. The approach is applied to experimental data acquired during a field trial by exploiting an experimental system developed at Fraunhofer FHR.

This work presents an analysis of passive inverse synthetic aperture radar images obtained exploiting simultaneously digital video broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) and digital video broadcasting-satellite (DVB-S) as illuminators of opportunity (IOs) over a cooperative maritime target with known motion. The combined exploitation of these two IOs is extremely appealing for passive imaging purposes, given their complementary characteristics.

This paper shows a first analysis of polarimetric passive ISAR images using digital video broadcasting-satellite (DVB-S(2)) as illuminator of opportunity. A measurement campaign has been conducted exploiting an experimental system developed at Fraunhofer FHR and a ferry as cooperative target. The collected data have been firstly processed by means of backprojection to obtain ISAR images at each polarimetric channel. Then two different representations in the polarimetric domain are considered. The first one is a color coding based on a modified Pauli decomposition.