An Experimental Study of Sea Target Detection of Passive Bistatic Radar Based on Non-cooperative Radar Illuminators.

This paper proposes a signal processing method of passive bistatic radar (PBR) exploiting a non-cooperative pulse radar as an illuminator. Compared with other opportunity illuminators, the transmitting signal of a radar usually has a better ambiguity function, which leads to a higher range resolution, but there is a problem that radar transmitting signal parameters are unknown, and radar signal processing, such as pulse compression, coherent integration, cannot be conducted accurately. The proposed method estimates radar signal parameters from the direct-path signal, and uses estimated parameters to radar signal processing of the scattered echo. The experiments use the shore-based maritime surveillance radar as a transmitter and moving ships from the seaport as the targets. There is a good agreement between the measured data of the proposed method and the AIS data. Results of AIS verify the correctness of this experiment.