Multi-input Multi-output Synthetic Aperture Radar with Collocated Antennas

The enormous effort devoted to the data acquisition, signal processing, and automatic recognition of stationary targets has resulted in a generation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems that are meeting the challenge of real-world conditions. However, in a practical battlefield, moving targets may pose a more severe threat than stationary targets. Many high value targets are only vulnerable while they are traveling and are generally invisible while in deep hide. Unfortunately, the attention paid to the ground moving target indication (GMTI) has been limited by the enormous challenges of acquiring and reliably processing the target location and target signatures. Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar is beginning to attract a significant amount of attention from researchers and practitioners alike due to its potential of advancing the state-of-the-art of modern radar. Herein we focus our attention on synergistic MIMO SAR and GMTI so that the tasks of the SAR imaging of stationary targets and background along with SAR based GMTI can be performed simultaneously by developing state-of-the-art MIMO SAR systems and focus on a MIMO radar scheme in which both the transmitting and receiving antennas are collocated (closely spaced) for coherent transmission and detection.