Airborne Passive Radar Detection for the APART-GAS Trial

In recent years, passive radar has been investigated for airborne applications in imaging and detection of ground targets. There are challenges with detection of land targets from an airborne platform due to platform motion which causes the clutter Doppler to spread and the presence of discrete scatterers which can be strong and confused with targets of interest. In this paper, we compare two different detection schemes to assess their performance on a real airborne passive radar data from a land scene North of Poland. These include a standard coherent scheme and a sparse signal separation algorithm known as morphological component analysis. The performance is measured using a Monte Carlo simulation where synthetic targets are injected into the real data set.