Ground or surface moving target detection (often called ground moving target indication or GMTI) consists of radar or EO detection of humans or tactical vehicles moving on or near the earth's surface. Animals and humans have little difficulty detecting movement and sorting unimportant movements from an important movement at short range. This is the result of hundreds of millions of years of selective evolution. For example, the frog's eye is especially adapted to detect and react to a fly-sized object moving through its field of vision. It is so good that its tongue is on the move to where the fly will be (not where it is) in less than 100 ms. Sadly, radars and EO sensors are not nearly that good over their ranges of operation (much longer than a frog's tongue!). In the following sections, the fundamental characteristics for discrimination of ground mover RCS, Doppler signature and clutter will be discussed.

Chapter Contents:

• 6.1 Introduction
• 6.2 Doppler clutter spread [3]
• 6.3 Doppler spectral situation
• 6.4 Typical RF front end
• 6.5 GMTI signal processing
• 6.6 GMTI wide area surveillance [13]
• 6.7 GMTI fast target detection and track [15]
• 6.7.1 Overview
• 6.7.2 GMT thresholding
• 6.7.3 GMT tracking
• 6.7.4 GMT Kalman tracking filters
• 6.7.5 GMT dwell times
• 6.8 Slow GMT detection by multiple phase centers
• 6.8.1 Slow GMT clutter phase history
• 6.8.2 Monopulse clutter cancellation [5,7,10,13]
• 6.8.3 DPCA clutter cancellation
• 6.8.4 STAP clutter cancellation
• 6.8.5 STAP examples
• 6.9 Integrated MTI and SAR processing
• 6.10 Synthetic monopulse MTI
• References

Inspec keywords: radar detection; object detection

Other keywords: GMTI; EO detection; earth surface; Doppler signature; movement detection; tactical vehicles; fly-sized object detection; ground moving target indication; surface moving target detection; radar clutter; ground moving target detection; ground mover RCS discrimination; EO sensors; unimportant movement sorting

Subjects: Radar equipment, systems and applications; Signal detection