AUTOMATIC AIRCRAFT LANDING USING INTERFEROMETRIC INVERSE SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR IMAGING

This paper presents an interferometric processing of an aircraft's mon ostatic and bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) signature s for automatic landing. The aircraft's squint angle in this ISAR imag ing problem is near 90 degrees. We show that this extreme squint angle does not pose any problem for the ISAR Fourier-based (wavefront) reco nstruction algorithm. In fact, the aircraft can be imaged accurately, and without any erroneous shifts in the cross-range domain, within the imposed theoretical resolution. Moreover, the algorithm is accurate e nough such that one can utilize the phase of ISAR monostatic and bista tic measurements for interferometric processing. The resultant interfe rometric ISAR image is used to detect undesirable rotations in the air craft's orientation.