Course Description:
Passive radar systems exploit existing illuminators of opportunity which results in the exciting possibility of low cost surveillance, covert operation, reduced pollution of the Electro-Magnetic environment, etc. Despite passive radar operation inherently implies that the transmitted waveform is not within the control of the radar designer, the practical feasibility and effectiveness of such systems for surveillance purposes has been well established.
Technology developments make readily available components and sub-systems that lend themselves to the effective development of passive radar sensors. This has led to upsurge in interest in such sensors and subsequent research activity which spans the globe. Many new possible applications are emerging in this specific time frame, covering from long range air and space surveillance, through to local surveillance of individuals at very short ranges. In fact passive radar attracts both civilian applications for the low-cost and low-emission characteristics, well in line with modern green-view of technology, and also the military components for the covert operation. Many national and international agencies have expressed explicit interest in this topic in the last few years.
The tutorial provides an introduction to the fundamental principles of passive bistatic radar (PBR). The main challenges of passive radar are described and different possible solutions are presented to motivate and explain the architecture and design of existing passive radar systems. Specifically the central features of conventional and more innovative signal/data processing methods in passive radar are described, with reference to disturbance cancellation, channel equalization, matched filtering, and target detection techniques. The discussion will cover many applications exploiting different illuminators of opportunity, including both analogue and digital broadcast transmissions (FM radio, DVB-T, GSM, WiFi, WiMAX, etc.), each one characterized by specific properties and requiring different technical solutions to maximize effectiveness. The essential requirements on the radar sub-systems, including antenna and receiver, are also explained together with possible strategies for a multistatic system topology design.
In addition to the theoretical aspects, the tutorial also contains numerous examples of results obtained by actual PBR systems with real data acquisitions against known air traffic and ground vehicular traffic and new insights for the way ahead. Future passive radar challenges and opportunities related to the exploitation of the e.m. sources of opportunity will be specifically addressed. For this reason, this tutorial can be of benefit to many engineers and scientists, both newcomers of this field, and those already involved in it but wishing to gain a more complete understanding of the most critical and most advance passive radar issues.
Instructor Biographies:
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Dr. Pierfrancesco Lombardo graduated in Electronic Engineering with distinction at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in July 1991. In November 1995, he received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome, Italy, where his research focused on detection and estimation techniques for the processing of high resolution, non-Gaussian SAR images. In 1991-1992 Dr. Lombardo served as Officer Engineer at the Official Test Center of the Italian Air Force of Pratica di Mare. In 1994 he was research associate at the University of Birmingham (UK), while working on high resolution non-Gaussian clutter estimation in the SAR processing team of the Defense Research Agency in Malvern (UK). Dr. Lombardo was involved in research on space-time adaptive processing for AEW and SAR at Syracuse University (NY-USA), where he was research associate in 1996. In June 1996 he joined as a Research Scientist the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where he was Associate Professor from 1998 to 2004, and is presently Full Professor. Dr. Lombardo is involved in, and coordinates, scientific research projects funded by the European Union Framework Programs, Italian Space Agency, the Italian Ministry of Research and the national Industry. |
He leads a group of researchers working at the radio-positioning laboratory at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” on radar, remote sensing and navigation. His main interests are in radar adaptive signal processing, radar clutter modelling, radar coherent detection, SAR processing and radio-localization systems. Dr. Lombardo’s research has been reported in over 170 publications in international technical journals and conferences. He served in the technical committee of many international conferences on radar systems and signal processing. He was Chairman of Technical Committee of the IEEE/ISPRS Joint Workshop on Remote Sensing and Data Fusion over Urban Areas URBAN’2001, Rome, Italy, URBAN’2003, Berlin, Germany, and URBAN’2005, Tempe, Arizona (US). He was also co-Chairman of the IEEE Radar Conference 2008. He is co-recipient of the best paper award, entitled to Mr. B. Carlton, of IEEE Trans. on Aerospace and Electronic Systems for the year 2001 and of the best paper award for the IEEE Trans. on Geoscience and Remote Sensing for the year 2003. Dr. Lombardo is a member of IEEE AES Radar System Panel, member of the Editorial board of the IET Proceedings on Radar Sonar and Navigation. He is associate Editor for Radar Systems for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems since June 2001. Dr. Lombardo is also member one of the twelve members of the Scientific Committee of the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) Joint Undertaking (European Commission & Eurocontrol). |
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Dr. Fabiola Colone received the laurea degree in Communication Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Remote Sensing from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" (Italy), in 2002 and 2006, respectively. |
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Dr. Alfonso Farina (Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of IET) received his doctor degree in electronic engineering from the University of Rome (I) in 1973. In 1974 he joined Selenia, now SELEX-Sistemi Integrati, where he is a manager (since May 1988). He was Scientific Director in the Chief Technical Office. Today he is Director of the Analysis of Integrated Systems Unit. In his professional life Alfonso has provided technical contributions to detection, signal, data, image processing and fusion for the main radar systems conceived, designed and developed in the Company. He has provided leadership in many projects – also conducted in the international arena – in surveillance for ground and naval applications, in airborne early warning and in imaging radar. Since 1979, he has also been Professore Incaricato of Radar Techniques at the University of Naples; in 1985 he was appointed Associate Professor. He is the author of more than 450 peer reviewed technical publications and the author of books and monographs: Radar Data Processing (Vol. 1 and 2) (translated in Russian and Chinese), 1985-1986 ; Optimised Radar Processors, 1987 ; Antenna Based Signal Processing Techniques for Radar Systems, 1992. He has written the chapter on “ECCM techniques” in the Radar Handbook (2nd edition 1990 and 3rd edition 2008), edited by Dr. M. I. Skolnik of Naval Research Laboratory (USA). He has been session chairman at many international radar conferences. He uses to lecture at universities and research centres in Italy and abroad; He also frequently gives tutorials at the Intl. Radar Conferences on signal, data and image processing for radar; in particular on multi-sensor fusion, adaptive signal processing, space time adaptive processing (STAP) and detection. In the 1987 He received the Radar Systems Panel Award of IEEE-AESS for development of radar data processing techniques. He is the Italian representative at the International Radar Systems Panel of IEEE-AESS. He is the Italian industrial representative (Panel Member at Large) at the SET (Sensor and Electronic Technology) of RTO (Research Technology Organisation) of NATO. He has been in the BoD of the International Society for Information Fusion (ISIF). He has been the Executive Chair of the International Conference on Information Fusion, Fusion 2006 (Florence, 10-13 July 2006). He has been nominated Fellow of IEEE with the following citation: "For development and application of adaptive signal processing methods for radar systems." Recently he has been nominated international fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK); this fellowship was presented to him by HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. He is a referee of numerous publications submitted to several Journals of IEEE, IEE, Elsevier, etc., He has also cooperated with the editorial board of ECEJ (Electronics & Communication Engineering Journal) of IEE. More recently, Alfonso has served as a member in the Editorial Board of Signal Processing (Elsevier). Also he has been the co-guest editor of the Signal Processing (Elsevier) special issue on “New trends and findings in antenna array processing for radar”, September 2004. He is the co-recipient of the following best paper awards: entitled to Mr. B. Carlton, of IEEE Trans. on Aerospace and Electronic Systems for the years 2001 and 2003; also of the International Conference on Fusion 2005. Alfonso has been the leader of the team that received the 2002 AMS CEO award for Innovation Technology. Alfonso has been the co-recipient of the AMS Radar Division award for Innovation Technology in 2003. Moreover, Alfonso has been the co-recipient of the 2004 AMS CEO award for Innovation Technology. He has been the leader of the team that has won in 2004 the 1st prize award for Innovation Technology of Finmeccanica (Italy). This award context has seen the submission of more than 320 projects. This award has been set for the first time in 2004. |
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