USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and IEEE Los Angeles Section Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Chapter present an IEEE Distinguished Lecture

Foliage Penetration Radar

Dr. Mark E. Davis, Consultant USA

Friday, September 12, 2014, 2:30 PM

EEB 132, USC Campus

3740 McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089

Description: Foliage Penetration (FOPEN) Radar is a technical approach to find and characterize man-made objections under dense foliage, as well as characterizing the foliage itself. It has applications in both military surveillance and civilian geospatial imaging. This Tutorial is divided into three parts.

• The early history of FOPEN Radar: battlefield surveillance and the early experiments in foliage penetration radar are covered. There were some very interesting developments in radar technology that enabled our ability to detect fixed and moving objects under dense foliage. An important breakthrough was the quantification of the radar propagation through foliage, and related scattering and loss effects.
• FOPEN synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with concentration on development results from several systems. These systems were developed for both military and commercial applications, and during a time of rapid awareness of the need and ability to operate in a dense signal environment. The tutorial quantifies the benefits of polarization diversity in detecting and characterizing both man made and natural objects. Furthermore, there is a clear benefit for use of polarization in false alarm mitigation. Finally the techniques developed for ultra-wideband (UWB) and ultra wide angle image formation will be presented.
• New research in Multi-mode Ultra-Wideband Radar, with the design of both SAR and moving target indication (MTI) FOPEN systems. Particular note will be taken on the benefits and difficulties in designing these ultra-wideband systems, and operation in real world electromagnetic environments. The tutorial will illustrate new technologies that have promise for future multi-mode operation: the need to detect low minimum discernible velocity; and simultaneous SAR and GMTI operation.

About the Speaker:  Mark E. Davis has over 45 years of experience in Radar technology and systems development. He has held senior management positions in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Research Laboratory, and General Electric Aerospace. At DARPA, he was the program manager on both the foliage penetration (FOPEN) radar advanced development program and the GeoSAR foliage penetration mapping radar. Dr. Davis wrote the text “Foliage Penetration Radar – Detection and Characterization of Objects Under Trees,” published by SciTech, Raleigh, NC in March 2011. His education includes a PhD in Physics from The Ohio State University, and Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University. He is a Life Fellow of both the IEEE and Military Sensing Symposia, and a member of the AESS Board of Governors and Past Chair of the AESS Radar Systems Panel.

For directions, see http://ee.usc.edu/about/maps.htm