A Proposed Stealthy Target Detection in Ground Plane Effect Based on Balloon-borne Netted System Using Hybrid (PO/TDOA) Method

Abstract

AbstractA proposed detection technique for stealthy target model F-117A based on balloon-borne netted radar system is applied. One of the potential problems of the proposed scheme is the ground plane effect caused by the high altitude platform. In this paper, we present a proposed study of the ground plane effect on the stealthy detection based on a new hybrid of the physical optics (PO) and time difference of arrival (TDOA) methods. Through simulation, the effect results of all parameters characterizing the clutter on balloon fall point distribution are obtained. To achieve high location accuracy of stealthy model, we proposed a scheme of detecting stealthy model in ground plane effect by using accurate radar cross section (RCS) measurement to compute the stealthy target position based on PO formulation. The netted radar sensitivity of proposed scheme has been improved due to increasing PO-scattered field of stealthy model with higher aspect angles of balloon-borne comparing to the conventional ground-based netted system, which has limited observability and poor detection due to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Simulations demonstrate that proposed scheme gives much higher location accuracy and reduces location errors comparing to the conventional system.