The stochastic characteristic of the radiation field of a mono-static microwave staring correlated imaging (MSCI) radar degenerates with the increase of the imaging distance, which results in degradation of the image quality. To address this issue, a novel MSCI method based on bi-static radar is proposed from two perspectives: site-deploying and waveform design. On the one hand, a new bi-static MSCI site-deploying scheme is proposed which adopts two transmitting stations with their azimuth angles relative to the center of the imaging region differing by 90 degrees. On the other hand, by using two transmitting arrays synchronously transmitting inner-and-inter pulse frequency hopping (IAIP-FH) signals, the radiation field of each station includes a few "frequency stripes" perpendicular to the radiation direction, and as a consequence, the "frequency stripes" of each radiation field are perpendicular to each other. As a result, the radiation field of the bi-static MSCI is the superposition of the two striped radiation fields, thus a latticed radiation field is constructed. Therefore, the targets in different latticed grids scatter independent fields, then, the images can be reconstructed using correlation process (CP) algorithms. The grid size of the latticed radiation field is determined by the inner-pulse frequency hopping (FH) interval of the IAIP-FH signals and the imaging geometry. Moreover, it is shown that the 3 dB beam width of the space correlation function of the radiation field does not change with the imaging distance, thus the stochastic characteristic of the radiation field is partly preserved when the imaging distance increases. Simulation results validate the analysis and show that the proposed method can obtain higher resolution images than the common mono-static MSCI method.
Keywords: bi-static Radar; inner-and-inter pulse frequency hopping signal; microwave staring correlated radar.