Correlation between SAR system resolution and target detection

Abstract

Target detection is an important part of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image interpretation, and its performance directly affects the accuracy of localisation and target recognition results in the region of interest. However, the SAR system resolution largely determines the SAR image index and imaging quality, and the target detection performance is closely related to the SAR system resolution in addition to the detection method. To improve the detection performance, the correlation between system resolution and target detection is investigated in this study. Multiple SAR images are used to test a SAR system with reduced resolution obtained by multi-look processing. At the theoretical level, the effect of different resolutions on target detection performance is analysed. MSTAR images, containing image chips with centred targets of varying orientation, are used to analyse the accuracy of the results. By comparing the measured experimental data with the simulation results, it can be obtained that the detection performance is the best when the resolution is roughly equal to the target scale.

Keywords

• radar imaging
• synthetic aperture radar
• object detection
• radar detection
• radar target recognition
• radar resolution
• image resolution
• centred targets
• target scale
• sar system resolution
• synthetic aperture radar image interpretation
• sar image index
• imaging quality
• target detection performance
• multiple sar images
• reduced resolution
• mstar images
• target recognition
• region of interest
• system resolution
• multilook processing
• image chips