Robust Clutter Suppression and Radial Velocity Estimation for High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR-GMTI

Abstract

Moving targets are usually smeared and imaged at incorrect positions in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images due to the target motions during the illumination time. Moreover, a moving target will cause multiple artifacts in the reconstructed image since pulse repetition frequency (PRF) operated in high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) SAR is very low. In order to reliably indicate moving targets, a robust cancellation algorithm is derived in this paper for clutter suppression in multichannel HRWS SAR, which is free by velocity searching and covariance matrix estimation of clutter plus noise. The proposed multilayer channel-cancellation combined with the deramp processing is designed to sequentially suppress the seriously aliased clutter in HRWS SAR. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and robust in tough situations, and have a superior detection ability in weak targets and low-velocity targets. In addition, the radial velocity estimation algorithm combined with the channel cancellation is exploited to relocate moving targets. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is validated by actual spaceborne SAR data acquired by a coordination experiment with two controllable vehicles.

Keywords

• deramp
• high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS)
• ground moving target indication (GMTI)
• multilayer channel-cancellation
• radial velocity
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)