Moving ships refocusing for spaceborne SAR based on Doppler parameters estimation

Abstract

Moving ships imaging is an important issue in marine remote-sensing by spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR). As the moving ships defocus generally in high-resolution spaceborne SAR images, the refocusing step is demanded for the following processing in classification and identification. A new refocusing method based on Doppler parameters search is proposed to enhance the performance of ship images. This method is applied directly on the single-look complex image data. Furthermore, the space-variant characteristic of Doppler parameters is taken into account within this method. Finally, the GF-3 satellite SAR data refocusing results of moving ships verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• ships
• synthetic aperture radar
• parameter estimation
• radar imaging
• spaceborne radar
• remote sensing by radar
• high-resolution spaceborne SAR images
• refocusing step
• refocusing method
• Doppler parameters search
• ship images
• single-look complex image data
• GF-3 satellite SAR data refocusing results
• Doppler parameters estimation
• moving ships imaging
• marine remote-sensing
• spaceborne synthetic aperture radar