$1.15M Funds UNM-SNL Collaboration on Synthetic Aperture Radar

ECE Professors Majeed Hayat and Balu Santhanam and their collaborators have received more than $1.15M in funding for developing a signal-processing method for combined radar imaging and vibrometry.

The work, led by Hayat, is a collaboration with Civil Engineering Prof. Walter Gerstle, ECE Prof. Jamesina Simpson, and Tom Atwood and Toby Townsend from Sandia National Laboratories.

Funding for the three-year project comes from three sources: the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration ($845,000 approved in May), the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Consortium of MASINT Research ($190,000 for year one, approved in June and administered by NSF), and SNL ($125,000 seed funding for 2007-2009). MASINT stands for "measures and signatures intelligence."

The vibrations of structures such as buildings and underground facilities that contain such things as concealed machinery or generators, active underground facilities, tanks, or personnel carriers have characteristic features, or signatures, that reveal information about how the structure is being used. These signatures can contain information of military, national-security or intelligence importance.

There is currently no single vibration sensing platform that allows simultaneous generation of imagery and a corresponding two-dimensional array of co-registered vibration spectrograms.

The proposed research introduces a signal-processing approach for synthetic aperture radar sensing based on the fractional Fourier transform (a generalization of the ordinary Fourier transform that suits nonstationary signals). The approach makes it possible to combine high-resolution imaging with co-registered sensing of spatial vibration information.

Both Atwood and Townsend at SNL have been working with Hayat, Santhanam and Gerstle on this research since early 2007.