A SAR-GMTI Approach Aided by Online Knowledge With an Airborne Multichannel Quad-Pol Radar System

Abstract

In the complicated geographical environment, there will be a seriously deleterious effect to the performance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-ground moving target indication (SAR-GMTI) system, because it is difficult to obtain the homogeneous training samples to accurately estimate the clutter covariance matrix (CCM) without prior information of the observed scene. To this end, this article proposes a SAR-GMTI approach aided by online knowledge with an airborne multichannel quadrature-polarimetric (quad-pol) radar system. Generally, this article can be divided into two parts: online knowledge acquisition and polarization knowledge-aided (Pol-KA) SAR-GMTI processing. First, based on the similarity of pixels from the multichannel and multipolarization information, a weighed estimation method of polarimetric coherency matrix is proposed, which can overcome the over-smoothing problem and increase the estimation accuracy of coherency matrix. Furthermore, a hybrid weighted local K-means based on geodesic distance (GD-HWLKM) clustering algorithm is proposed to achieve the aim of unsupervised classification. Here, GD is exploited to measure the distance between multifeature region covariance matrixes (MFRCMs) and a hybrid weight from different scales (including local cover class distribution, region, and pixel) is calculated to automatically update the cluster centroid, which can make full use of the local spatial information by taking the interclass samples’ similarity and the diversity of different classes into consideration. Second, with the assistance of the previous polarization SAR (PolSAR) image classification result, a Pol-KA SAR-GMTI method is developed. For each ground cover category, an accurate CCM can be estimated with the independent and identically distributed (IID) training samples. Then, the multichannel clutter suppression and preliminary constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection are performed. Finally, with an airborne multichannel quad-pol radar system, the experimental results on real measured data demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently improve the clutter suppression preformation and moving-target detection preformation.

Keywords

• Ground moving target indication (GMTI)
• online knowledge
• quadrature-polarimetric (quad-pol) radar
• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• weighted K-means clustering