Complete radar simulation chain: Application to maritime patrol surveillance using SAR/ISAR modes

This paper presents a new radar simulation tool, developed by ONERA and SCALIAN DS and related to the DGA “EMPRISE (R)” project. This project develops a complete simulation chain for raw signal generation of large scene with several applications and processing chains. It is composed of different modules for the scene models as well as the raw signal generation and the processing that can be associated in different applications with an all in one GUI and a high computation performance. Applications includes SAR/ISAR with the possibility to create images of large terrestrial and maritime scenes, and application for maritime surveillance with generic detection and tracking processing integrated in a PPI (Plan Position Indicator) view to perform the airborne coastal and maritime surveillance. The EMPRISE (R) EM SCENE MODEL (“EM-SM”) is the heart of the simulator that computes the signal coming from the ground/sea and the targets. The approach of the simulator is a time domain computation on a scene composed of an ensemble of geolocalized independent point contributors. After a description of the software architecture, we describe the capabilities and validations for maritime applications on a radar watch application and a Stripmap SAR application. Finally, for validation purposes, we will present a comparison between simulations and measurements of maritime scenes for a vessel in open sea and for a vessel on a quayside.