The objective of this tutorial is to describe land, sea, and weather clutter in a manner understandable to both new and experienced radar engineers. Clutter characteristics applicable to radar system design will be discussed, but specific techniques or processors for clutter suppression will not be addressed. The tutorial will begin with a brief discussion on basic reflectivity concepts and definitions. Course material will include echo amplitude statistics, Doppler spectra, statistical independence of pulses, spiky clutter, average radar cross section, and effects of changes in polarization or frequency. The tutorial will be closed with a summary of principal features of land, sea, and rain clutter; and a list of references.

This Tutorial has a recommended book:

?Radar Reflectivity of Land and Sea?, 3rd edition, Maurice W. Long, Artech House, 2001.

You may order this book at a 15% discount and free shipping by contacting Dudley Kay at Scitech Publishing, 919-866-1501, or email dkay@scitechpub.com. Please order the book no later than April 15, 2004 in order to receive it before leaving for the conference (before April 23rd).

Since its origins in the 1950s, Synthetic Aperture Radar is now a well-established part of the radar art, and is routinely used, with both aircraft-borne and satellite-borne systems for surveillance purposes and for geophysical remote sensing. The objective of the tutorial is to provide an understanding of the fundamentals of SAR imaging, the processing algorithms used to form the SAR image, the limitations and tradeoffs in SAR system design, and a variety of SAR applications, including spotlight mode, MTI, motion compensation, low-frequency SAR and interferometric SAR. Both aircraft-borne and spaceborne systems will be covered, with numerous examples of practical SAR systems and images, from all over the world. * historical background * SAR principles * SAR processing * SAR applications * airborne surveillance * stripmap and spotlight modes * MTI * spaceborne SAR applications * interferometric SAR

The first half of this tutorial will build upon the basic STAP material by deriving the concepts from a radar detection theoretic foundation. This rigorous approach reveals many of the assumptions that go into the linear algebra of STAP and identifies area for advanced research in the field. Many of the problems in STAP can be addressed by intelligent signal processing: reduced rank adaptive processing and incorporating prior knowledge represent two powerful approaches that are synergetic.

In the second half of this tutorial, an in-depth overview of the newly emerging area of knowledge-aided sensor signal processing and expert reasoning (KASSPER) will be explored. Through the exploitation of a new real-time embedded computing architecture incorporating a high-fidelity physical database, many adaptation problems due to nonstationary clutter environments can be solved in an entirely new manner. Details of ?look-ahead? scheduling for real-time database management and KASSPER algorithm concepts will be provided along with results for both simulated and measured data.

This Tutorial has a recommended book:

?Space-Time Adaptive Processing for Radar?, Joseph R. Guerci, Artech House, 2003.

You may order this book at a 15% discount and free shipping by contacting Dudley Kay at Scitech Publishing, 919-866-1501, or email dkay@scitechpub.com. Please order the book no later than April 15, 2004 in order to receive it before leaving for the conference (before April 23rd).

In the last ten years, there has been significant emphasis on advancing sensor systems with active electronically-steered arrays (AESAs). The recent advances in computing technologies make it affordable to exploit the flexibility of AESA antennas using very high performance embedded computers for signal and image processing. This tutorial presents an overview of applications demanding real-time embedded computing, an introduction to hardware and software implementation techniques, recent advances in hardware and software standards to achieve rapid technology insertion, and a look into observed embedded computing trends.

A network-centric warfare implies leveraging information from multiple assets in-theater. However, communicating sensor data without significant processing on board the sensor platform would completely clog the available and future communication bandwidth. In the next ten to twenty years, AESA-based sensors will consist of 100 to 1000 sensor channels, with data rates exceeding hundreds of billion bytes per second (driven by analog-to-digital converter sampling rates). Therefore, on-board computation will be necessary to reduce data rates and to transform signal and image data into information. This information from ground, air, and space assets will then be routed across the theater and globally to permit extracting the requisite knowledge needed by our warfighters. The tutorial focuses on the sensor real-time computation to transform data into information demanding computations reaching and, in some cases, exceeding a trillion operations per second.

The tutorial will start by reviewing example applications centered on AESA architectures. These applications will highlight typical computation, communication, and memory requirements, constrained to implementations with stressing low size, weight, and power goals. After setting the application domain and on-board signal and image processing complexity drivers, implementation options are reviewed. The options range from custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), digital signal processors (DSPs), and general purpose processors. The tutorial material will include working through an FPGA design example using contemporary tools. The tutorial concludes with an introduction to embedded software practices and techniques. Particular emphasis is put on emerging software middleware standards and an open system architecture for real-time embedded systems.

This tutorial is designed for system designers, algorithm developers, hardware and software designers, and program managers interested in an overview and introduction to real-time embedded computing with emphasis on AESA antennas. The tutorial content will also address emerging trends in hardware, software, and rapid prototyping techniques. The tutorial draws from the authors? over fifty years of combined experience in these areas.

?This work is sponsored by DARPA under Air Force Contract No. F19628-00-C0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Air Force.?