Data fusion of target characteristic in multistatic passive radar

Radar cross section (RCS) is an important attribute of radar targets and has been widely used in automatic target re-cognition (ATR). In a passive radar, only the RCS multiplied by a coefficient is available due to the unknown transmitting parame-ters. For different transmitter-receiver (bistatic) pairs, the coeffi-cients are different. Thus, the recovered RCS in different trans-mitter-receiver (bistatic) pairs cannot be fused for further use. In this paper, we propose a quantity named quasi-echo-power (QEP) as well as a method for eliminating differences of this quantity among different transmitter-receiver (bistatic) pairs. The QEP is defined as the target echo power after being com-pensated for distance and pattern propagation factor. The pro-posed method estimates the station difference coefficients (SDCs) of transmitter-receiver (bistatic) pairs relative to the refer-ence transmitter-receiver (bistatic) pair first. Then, it com-pensates the QEP and gets the compensated QEP. The com-pensated QEP possesses a linear relationship with the target RCS. Statistical analyses on the simulated and real-life QEP data show that the proposed method can effectively estimate the SDC between different stations, and the compensated QEP from different receiving stations has the same distribution character-istics for the same target.