Detecting personnel in wooded areas using MIMO radar

This paper discusses the problem of detecting personnel in wooded areas using radar. Radio wave propagation at high frequencies suffers severe attenuation in forests which means low-frequency radar is required. However, stand-alone compact low-frequency radars have a poor angular resolution, which suggests use of a distributed radar system. A proposed solution to the problem is the use of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. This approach exploits the angular diversity of widely spaced transmit and receive antennas to combat dynamic range and multipath problems associated with the complex scattering environment present in the forest. We assess the feasibility of the concept through simulation of radio propagation in a forest using a simple point scatterer model and a more detailed radio frequency scattering approximation using a CAD model of a forest.