GNSS-based multistatic passive radar imaging of ship targets

This work brings forward a framework for passive radar imaging of ship targets by exploiting the reflections of navigation satellite signals. The specific objective is taking advantage of the inherent multistatic nature of the system for the ship passive imagery. To this aim, a bistatic image formation stage is first defined. Then, the bistatic images obtained over multiple baselines are mapped in a domain independent on the particular satellite viewing angle. Finally, different combination rules of the multiple images are defined in order to enable multistatic imagery with enhanced quality, potentially enabling finer feature extraction procedures for ship classification. The proposed approaches are validated and compared via an experimental campaign comprising multiple Galileo satellites and a commercial ferry undergoing different types of motion.