Motion of ground moving targets and implications for aided recognition

In air-to-ground radar imaging, the motion characteristics of ground moving vehicles are often ignored or implicitly assumed as being trivial. A pilot study conducted during September 2000 suggested that the motions are in fact far from simple. Results have been gained from a controlled experiment that measured the 3-axis rotation behaviour of a variety of military vehicles transiting different terrain. Typical rotation rates as high as 30/spl deg/ s/sup -1/ were seen in more than one axis of rotation for a tracked vehicle moving at speed off-road, and these rates are encountered up to 2% of the time. These results suggest that significant attention should be paid to typical motion characteristics when considering moving target identification and imaging problems.