A Comparative Study of Radar Imaging of the Target Obscured by Random Media

In this paper, we compare the imaging performance for the point target obscured by random media of three commonly used techniques, namely: synthetic aperture radar (SAR), time reversal (TR), and time reversal-multiple signal classification (TR-MUSIC). For quantitative evaluation, both 3-dB beam width and geometric accuracy of a point target response are used. The results of three methods are all degraded by the presence of random media, and become poorer with denser media in which the effects of the scattering thickness is the main factor causing imaging degradation. Among the three techniques, TR-MUSIC offers the best imaging performance and suppress the grating lobes under a sparse array. Taking advantage of this, in TR-MUSIC we use a special array to enhance the imaging performance and to reduce the complexity of the radar system.