Independent source extraction applied to radar imaging

Multiple scattering and random interactions among scattering elements and between the scatterers and the background adversely affect the radar image quality and target detection capability. In radar images formed using physical optics (PO) based techniques, multiple scattering and interactions appear as non-physical scattering centers. A method to enhance the performance of PO based radar imaging systems by extracting independent scattering centers is investigated in this thesis. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is applied to returns of a radar system to extract independent scattering elements based on their non-Gaussianity. As an example, this method of target extraction is implemented in inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of a variety of targets. Results of this study show that the application of this radar signal processing technique has allowed extraction of independent components which are related to scattering elements within the target.