Passive Multistatic Radar Imaging of Vessel Target Using GNSS Satellites of Opportunity

The global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based passive radar shows potential in permanent maritime surveillance. In this paper, the GNSS signals are exploited for vessel target imaging. From the obtained radar image, meaningful information about the vessel, such as its shape, position, length, and orientation can be extracted. In addition, the vessel is observed from different angles by spatially diverse GNSS satellites, and the multistatic geometry enables to enhance the imagery quality. The main drawback of GNSS-based passive radar stays in its limited power budget. And the inaccessible motion makes the noncooperative vessel smeared using conventional radar imaging methods. To address the problems, at first, each bistatic echo over a long observation time is integrated in range and Doppler (RD) domain after removing the two-dimensional migrations. The signal-to-noise ratio can be increased after the step. Then, with respect to a particular target velocity, the local Cartesian plane is constructed, and the multiple RD maps are projected and combined in the plane to obtain the multistatic image. In view of the inaccessibility of target kinematic parameters, such imaging processing is modeled as an optimization problem, where vessel’s velocity is set as decision variable and the aim is to minimize the image entropy. Finally, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to solve the optimization problem, after which a well-focused vessel image can be obtained. In May 2021, we have successfully carried out the world’s first BeiDou-based passive radar maritime experiment, and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified against the experimental data.