Patent ID: 6917784

Claim:
A method of generating an image of a terrestrial region upon which electromagnetic energy from an electromagnetic energy source is incident, said method comprising the steps of: (a) passively collecting non-scattered electromagnetic energy emitted by said electromagnetic energy source by way of at least one first passive electromagnetic energy collector that is exclusive of any electromagnetic energy emission element employed by said electromagnetic energy source to emit said electromagnetic energy; (b) passively collecting, by at least one second passive electromagnetic energy collector moving arbitrarily and independently of said electromagnetic energy source among a plurality of distributed energy collection locations, electromagnetic energy emitted by said electromagnetic energy source and scattered by features of said terrestrial region of interest, said at least one second passive electromagnetic energy collector being exclusive of any electromagnetic energy transmission element employed by said electromagnetic energy source; (c) processing a reference signal representative of electromagnetic energy collected in step (a), in accordance with information representative of the collection geometry of said at least one first passive energy collector and the geolocation of said electromagnetic energy source, so as to derive a time- and location-corrected reference signal; (d) correlating the time- and location-corrected reference signal derived in step (c) with an image signal representative of electromagnetic energy collected by said at least one moving second passive energy collector in step (b), so as to derive composite amplitude and phase values of scattering components for plural locations of said terrestrial region as received by said at least one moving second passive energy collector as a function of spatial position; and e) processing said composite scattering components derived in step (d) to produce said multidimensional image of said terrestrial region of interest.