Synthetic aperture radar imaging exploiting multiple scattering

In this paper, we consider an imaging scenario, where a bi-static synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is used in a multiple scattering environment. We consider a ray-theoretic approximation to the Green function to model a multiple scattering environment. This allows us to incorporate the multiple paths followed by the transmitted signal, thereby providing different views of the object to be imaged. However, the received signal from the multiple paths and additive thermal noise may interfere and produce artifacts when standard backprojection-based reconstruction algorithms are used. We use microlocal analysis in a statistical setting to develop a novel filtered-backprojection type image reconstruction method that not only exploits the multi-paths leading to enhancement of the reconstructed image but also suppresses the artifacts due to interference. We assume a priori knowledge of the second-order statistics of the target and noise to suppress the artifacts due to interference in a mean-square error sense. We present numerical simulations to demonstrate the performance of our image reconstruction method. While the focus of this paper is on radar applications, our image formation method is also applicable to other problems arising in fields such as acoustic, geophysical and medical imaging. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)