  With the present revival of interest in bistatic radar systems, research in
that area has gained momentum. Given some of the strategic advantages for a
bistatic configuration, and tech- nological advances in the past few years,
large-scale implementation of the bistatic systems is a scope for the near
future. If the bistatic systems are to replace the monostatic systems (at least
par- tially), then all the existing usages of a monostatic system should be
manageable in a bistatic system. A detailed investigation of the possibilities
of an automatic target recognition (ATR) facil- ity in a bistatic radar system
is presented. Because of the lack of data, experiments were carried out on
simulated data. Still, the results are positive and make a positive case for
the introduction of the bistatic configuration. First, it was found that,
contrary to the popular expectation that the bistatic ATR performance might be
substantially worse than the monostatic ATR performance, the bistatic ATR
performed fairly well (though not better than the monostatic ATR). Second, the
ATR per- formance does not deteriorate substantially with increasing bistatic
angle. Last, the polarimetric data from bistatic scattering were found to have
distinct information, contrary to expert opinions. Along with these results,
suggestions were also made about how to stabilise the bistatic-ATR per-
formance with changing bistatic angle. Finally, a new fast and robust ATR
algorithm (developed in the present work) has been presented.
