Adaptive Target Detection With Application to Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging

An adaptive detection scheme is proposed for radar imaging. The proposed detector is a postprocessing scheme derived for one-, two-, and three-dimensional data, and applied to through-the-wall imaging using synthetic aperture radar. The target image statistics depend on the target three-dimensional orientation and position. The statistics can also vary with the standoff distance of the imaging system because of the change in the corresponding scene image resolution. We propose an iterative target detection scheme for the cases in which no or partial a priori knowledge of the target image statistics is available. Properties of the proposed scheme, such as conditions of convergence and optimal configurations are introduced. The detector performance is examined under synthetic and real data. The latter is obtained using a synthetic aperture through-the-wall radar indoor imaging scanner implementing wideband delay and sum beamforming.