United States of America As Represented by the Secretary of the Air Force

Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation

Other

Norman F Powell

Carl D Wise

Clinton W Moulds

Giora A Bendor

Henry G Mallean

David R Iny

A synthesized aperture radar imaging system is disclosed. The system includes an antenna reflector and a radar signal transceiver configured to generate a plurality of radar transmission signals and to receive a respective plurality of reflected radar signals. The system also includes a wave reflection device configured to sequentially reflect each of the plurality of radar transmission signals onto separate respective spot-portions of the antenna reflector. The plurality of radar transmission signals can be transmitted from the antenna reflector to a target and reflected from the target as the respective plurality of reflected radar signals. The system further includes a synthesized aperture radar controller configured to integrate the plurality of reflected radar signals and to generate a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of the target from the integrated plurality of reflected radar signals.

Synthesized aperture three-dimensional radar imaging

A method of selling custom business software and a software exchange marketplace enables a software seller to offer a custom software application for sale. The method includes receiving the custom software application from the software seller. The marketplace includes a qualified application inventory and a custom software application submission log. A prospective software buyer may search the qualified software application inventory. The method includes associating the custom application with the custom software application submission log. The method identifies deficiencies with a software source code by comparing the software source code to a source code qualification standard. The method identifies deficiencies with a plurality of software documents by comparing them to a document qualification standard. The method compares the submission log with a final review standard. The method qualifies the software source code and software documents before listing them in the qualified software application inventory.

Method for selling custom business software and software exchange marketplace

A local area positioning system which includes a plurality of platforms or nodes consisting of airborne and/or ground based vehicles that are coupled in a platform-to-platform local area network. The platforms themselves establish a spatial reference system for location and communication between platforms is accomplished using directive millimeter wave beams, and where measurements and communicated estimates of node locations, in a local inertial reference frame, are processed via Kalman tracking filters to generate updated estimates of position and velocity vectors associated with each node.

Local area positioning system

An airborne bistatic radar synchronization apparatus and process is presented which receives clutter point echo returns from the bistatic radar receiver on a penetrator aircraft, and determines therefrom the location of the illuminator aircraft without the need of receiving direct path signals from the radar transmitter on board the illuminator aircraft. Once the state of the illuminator aircraft (position and velocity) has been determined, the estimate of the illuminator state may be refined using direct path data. Finally, a target location algorithm is applied to bistatic target echo returns to calculate an equivalent monostatic range for a desired target, and provide an estimate of the location of the target.

Autonomous synchronization of a bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR)

This invention is directed to an image processing arrangement used to estimate image displacement relative to a reference frame. It comprises a discrete complex correlator, an associated interpolator, and a displacement estimator. The unique nature of the system is its ability to estimate shifts of a fraction of a pixel for sparcely sampled data. This is accomplished by extracting the complex gradients from the gray scale data and in turn correlating the gradients via a discrete complex correlator. The resulting cross correlation function is then interpolated to yield an accurate estimate of the shift. The invention is particularly adapted for use in the autofocus portion of a synthetic aperture radar imaging system.

Discrete complex correlation device for obtaining subpixel accuracy

A feature referenced error correction apparatus utilizing the multiple images of the interstage level image format to compensate for positional displacement errors in the synthetic aperture radar imaging. Error compensation is accomplished through the registration of key features of sub-aperture images and by the generation of an error correction signal in response to the sub-frame registration errors.

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Ellicott City, MD, United States of America

Norman F Powell