Radar Signatures of a Passenger Car

Kurzfassung

The upcoming new SAR satellites like TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 offer high spatial image resolution and dual receive antenna capabilities which open new opportunities for world-wide traffic monitoring applications. If the radar cross section of the vehicles is strong enough they can be detected in the SAR data and their speed can be measured. For a system performance prediction and algorithm development it is therefore indispensable to know the radar cross section of typical passenger cars. The geometry parameters which have to be considered are the radar look direction, incidence angle and the vehicle orientation. In this paper the radar signatures of non-moving or parking cars are presented. They are measured experimentally from airborne E-SAR data, which have been collected during flight campaigns in 2005 and 2006 with multiple over-flights at different aircraft headings. The radar signatures could be measured for the whole range of aspect angles from 0º to 180º and with high angular resolution due to the large synthetic aperture length of the E-SAR radar sensor. The analysis for one type of passenger cars and particular incidence angles showed that the largest radar cross section values and thus the greatest chance of detection of the vehicles appears when the car is seen from the front, the back and from the side. Radar cross section values for slanted views are much lower and are therefore less suitable for car detection. The measurements have been performed in X-Band (9.6GHz), VV-polarization and at incidence angles of 41.5º and 42.5º. The derived radar signature profile can also be used for the verification of radar cross section simulation studies.