RADAR IMAGING SYSTEM AND METHOD

An imaging processing system and method. In accordance with the invention, the illustrative method includes the steps of providing a transfer function between scene excitations and voltage returns based on geometry, beam pattern and/or scan rate; ascertaining a set of scene excitations that minimize a penalty function of the transfer function; and ascertaining a set of scene intensities based on the scene excitations, and a set of optimal weights for the penalty function based on the scene reflectivities. The inventive method provides significantly enhanced image sharpening. In the illustrative embodiment, the inventive method uses an iterative convergence technique which minimizes a penalty function of the sum of square errors between the scene excitations corrupted by the radar system (i.e. the antenna pattern and processing) and the radar voltage returns. The innovation significantly enhances radar imagery by iteratively deriving a best scene solution, which reduces corruption introduced by the radar system. The novel technique for enhanced discrimination by the radar imagery is an iterative technique, which models the true scene signal corruption and derives a solution for the scene intensities, which minimizes the errors in the derived image. The novel technique finds the scene scatterer powers, which best match the original image pixel powers. The effect of the antenna pattern is taken into consideration when computing the derived image, which is matched against the original image. The constraint is implemented iteratively by adding a weighted sum of scene powers to the penalty function. The weights are adjusted at each iteration.