Improved Detection for Passive Radar by Illumination Matching on Reference Channel

A novel technique for enhancing the detection of targets of interest is presented for application on the context of passive radar. The methodology is inspired on the well known Matched Illumination technique used in active systems and applies to scenarios where the targets can be modeled as having a few predominant scatterers. Since passive systems have no control over the signals which are transmitted by the illuminators of opportunity, the paper proposes to match the signal received on the reference channel. Results show that the correlation function will be enhanced for the targets of interest, relatively to the remaining targets and the clutter on the target region.