Small mover target detection in synthetic aperture radar imagery
| DWPI Title: Computing system for detecting small moving entities or targets, such as person, in radar imagery, comprises a memory that has instructions that are executed by a processor to generate an excess coherency factor image of a region |
| Abstract: The various technologies presented herein relate to detecting small moving entities or targets in radar imagery. Two SAR images can be captured for a common scene, wherein the scene is imaged twice from the same flight path. The first image is captured at a first instance and the second image is captured at a second instance, and differences between the two images are determined using a complex SAR change measure, excess coherency factor or DeltaC, based in part upon quantification of incoherent (or magnitude) change between the two images. A plurality of operations are performed to enable extraction of coherent change measures relating to the small moving entities from measures relating to large objects, stationary reflective structures, radar focusing artifacts, etc. |
| Use: Computing system for detecting small moving entities or targets, such as person or animal, in radar imagery. |
| Advantage: The synthetic aperture radar images undergo smoothing to minimize the deleterious effects of synthetic aperture radar speckle in subsequent image processing, while providing a high degree of success and accuracy in identifying targets, and differentiate the smears resulting from the small targets from unwanted artifacts, such as the reflections from the berms. |
| Novelty: The computing system (100) comprises a memory (154) that has instructions that are executed by a processor (152) to generate an excess coherency factor image (185) of a region. The excess coherency factor (ECF) image is generated based upon a stack of registered synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The stack of registered SAR images includes a first synthetic aperture radar image (170) of the region captured at a first time. A second synthetic aperture radar image (172) of the region, which is captured at a second time. A filtering operation over the ECF image is performed to generate a filtered ECF image. An indication of a location of a target in the region to an operator is outputted based upon the filtered ECF image, where target (136) being one of a human or other animal. |
| Filed: 12/2/2015 |
| Application Number: US14957394A |
| Tech ID: SD 13152.0 |
| This invention was made with Government support under Contract No. DE-NA0003525 awarded by the United States Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration. The Government has certain rights in the invention. |
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