SAR ground moving target's along-track velocity estimation in the complex image domain via SoWVD

Abstract

A ground moving target is always defocused in the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image domain due to the along-track velocity. In the image domain, a moving target's complex response along the azimuth direction can be modelled as a linear frequency-modulated signal, therefore, its Doppler rate, as well as the along-track velocity, can be estimated based on the recently proposed second-order Wigner–Ville (SoWVD) distribution transform. The proposed method has a low computational complexity without the search procedure and can be well combined with the SAR ground moving target detection algorithms in image domain, where the signal to clutter-plus-noise ratio is higher than other domains. Finally, the effectiveness of this method is verified with some numerical experiments.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar
• wigner distribution
• object detection
• radar imaging
• radar tracking
• target tracking
• frequency modulation
• doppler radar
• transforms
• radar detection
• radar clutter
• second-order wigner–ville distribution transform
• sar image
• synthetic aperture radar image
• sar ground moving target detection algorithms
• doppler rate
• linear frequency-modulated signal
• sowvd
• complex image domain
• along-track velocity estimation