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Digital Beamforming on Receive: Techniques and Optimization Strategies for High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR Imaging

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a well-proven imaging technique for remote sensing of the Earth. However, conventional SAR systems are not capable of fulfilling the increasing demands for improved spatial resolution and wider swath coverage. To overcome these inherent limitations, several innovative techniques have been suggested which employ multiple receive-apertures to gather additional information along the synthetic aperture. These digital beamforming (DBF) on receive techniques are reviewed with particular emphasis on the multi-aperture signal processing in azimuth and a multi-aperture reconstruction algorithm is presented that allows for the unambiguous recovery of the Doppler spectrum. The impact of Doppler aliasing is investigated and an analytic expression for the residual azimuth ambiguities is derived. Further, the influence of the processing on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is analyzed, resulting in a pulse repetition frequency (PRF) dependent factor describing the SNR scaling of the multi-aperture beamforming network. The focus is then turned to a complete high-resolution wide-swath SAR system design example which demonstrates the intricate connection between multi-aperture azimuth processing and the system architecture. In this regard, alternative processing approaches are compared with the multi-aperture reconstruction algorithm. In a next step, optimization strategies are discussed as pattern tapering, prebeamshaping-on-receive, and modified processing algorithms. In this context, the analytic expressions for both the residual ambiguities and the SNR scaling factor are generalized to cascaded beamforming networks. The suggested techniques can moreover be extended in many ways. Examples discussed are a combination with ScanSAR burst mode operation and the transfer to multistatic sparse array configurations.

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Errata: Digital Beamforming on Receive: Techniques and Optimization Strategies for High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR Imaging

The present article is an introductory paper in this special issue on synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A short review is presented on the recent trend and development of SAR and related techniques with selected topics, including the fields of applications, specifications of airborne and spaceborne SARs, and information contents in and interpretations of amplitude data, interferometric SAR (InSAR) data, and polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data. The review is by no means extensive, and as such only brief summaries of of each selected topics and key references are provided. For further details, the readers are recommended to read the literature given in the references theirin.

Recent Trend and Advance of Synthetic Aperture Radar with Selected Topics

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a remote sensing technique, capable of providing high-resolution images independent of weather conditions and sunlight illumination. This makes SAR very attractive for the systematic observation of dynamic processes on the Earth's surface. However, conventional SAR systems are limited in that a wide swath can only be achieved at the expense of a degraded azimuth resolution. This limitation can be overcome by using systems with multiple receive apertures, displaced in along track, but a very long antenna is required to map a wide swath. If a relatively short antenna with a single aperture in along track is available, it is still possible to map a wide area: Multiple swaths can be, in fact, simultaneously imaged using digital beamforming in elevation, but “blind ranges” are present between adjacent swaths. This paper considers an innovative concept, staggered SAR, where the pulse repetition interval (PRI) is continuously varied. This concept allows the imaging of a wide continuous swath without the need for a long antenna with multiple apertures. The choice of the sequence of PRIs and the preprocessing of the raw data are discussed in detail, showing how the staggered SAR is even less affected by ambiguities of pointlike or extended targets with respect to a system with constant PRI, which simultaneously maps multiple swaths. Some system design examples are finally presented and compared.

Staggered SAR: High-Resolution Wide-Swath Imaging by Continuous PRI Variation

Range cell migration (RCM) correction and azimuth spectrum being contained entirely in baseband are critical for ground moving-target imaging (GMTIm). Without the azimuth spectrum entirely contained within baseband and a proper RCM correction, the image will be defocused, or artifacts may appear in the image. An instantaneous-range-Doppler algorithm of GMTIm based on deramp-keystone processing is proposed. The main idea is to focus all the targets in the scene at an arbitrarily chosen azimuth time. With our proposed algorithm, RCMs of all targets in the scene are removed without a priori knowledge of their accurate motion parameters. The targets with azimuth spectrum not entirely in baseband, i.e., azimuth spectrum within an ambiguous pulse repeating frequency (PRF) band or spanning neighboring PRF bands, can also be effectively dealt with simultaneously. Theoretical analysis shows that no interpolation is needed. The simulated and real data are used to validate the effectiveness of this method.

Robust Ground Moving-Target Imaging Using Deramp–Keystone Processing

This paper deals with an omega-K algorithm for focusing bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The key of the proposed algorithm is the derivation of a frequency mapping function by using Neo's method of series reversion. The registration of the focused image onto the ground plane is discussed in detail, which is based on a conclusion that the targets whose instantaneous Doppler frequencies at zero azimuth time are the same as that of the reference target at zero azimuth time will all be focused at the reference target's azimuth position in the focused image. The range invariance region size, which the proposed algorithm can process, is also determined in this paper. The proposed algorithm can handle extreme bistatic configurations with wide apertures and large squint angles. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is confirmed by simulation results. Although developed for the azimuth-invariant case, the proposed algorithm can be readily extended to the azimuth-variant case, as long as we divide the SAR data into blocks in the azimuth direction so that each block of SAR data can be assumed quasi-stationary in the azimuth direction.

Bistatic SAR Data Focusing Using an Omega-K Algorithm Based on Method of Series Reversion

As training samples are not always identically distributed with the clutter in the cell under test (CUT) in heterogeneous environments, the estimated clutter covariance matrix for space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is not accurate, which degrades the performance of STAP To improve the performance of STAP in heterogeneous environments, this letter proposes a novel training sample selection algorithm to estimate the covariance matrix Based on the subaperture smoothing techniques, subapertures' covariance matrices are estimated, which are used to measure the similarities between the clutter covariance matrix of the CUT and the clutter covariance matrices of the training samples Training samples whose clutter covariance matrices are similar to that of the CUT are selected, leading to a better estimation of the clutter covariance matrix, and the performance of STAP improves Experimental results confirm the performance of the proposed algorithm

Training Sample Selection for Space-Time Adaptive Processing in Heterogeneous Environments

Clutter suppression for airborne FDA-MIMO radar using multi-waveform adaptive processing and auxiliary channel STAP

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques have achieved good performance when applied to side-looking airborne radar (SLAR) where the ground clutter is relatively stationary, but due to severe range dependence, the performance is not so good in non-SLAR particularly when the pulse repetition frequency is high enough to induce range ambiguity. Because the short-range clutter Doppler for non-SLAR varies rapidly with range while the long-range clutter Doppler varies gently, at the presence of range ambiguity, the clutter in different ambiguous ranges does not coincide. The clutter range dependence mitigation for the case of range ambiguity is the major problem that this letter intends to solve. A subarray synthesis algorithm with prefiltering in elevation is presented. By this technique, the ambiguous short-range clutter is eliminated before STAP; therefore, the clutter range dependence is alleviated, and then, the STAP performance will be improved greatly.

Short-Range Clutter Suppression for Airborne Radar by Utilizing Prefiltering in Elevation

In this letter, a two-channel airborne experimental interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) designed for terrain height estimation is exploited to acquire the ability of ground moving target indication (GMTI). Due to the hybrid baseline of this system, the interferometric phase changes with the target motion as well as the terrain height. The fluctuation of the interferometric phase worsens the performance of the clutter suppression and the radial velocity estimation. In order to resolve this problem, a GMTI method with three steps is proposed. After two steps are used to eliminate the local flat-Earth phase and the cross-track interferometric phase of the scene, respectively, an adaptive filtering method is used to suppress the stationary clutter with the benefit of calibrating the sensor responses. A conventional constant false alarm rate detector is then used to indicate the moving targets. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated with real data collected using an experimental airborne InSAR system.

Tong Wang

Papers

Bistatic SAR Data Focusing Using an Omega-K Algorithm Based on Method of Series Reversion

Training Sample Selection for Space-Time Adaptive Processing in Heterogeneous Environments

Clutter suppression for airborne FDA-MIMO radar using multi-waveform adaptive processing and auxiliary channel STAP

Short-Range Clutter Suppression for Airborne Radar by Utilizing Prefiltering in Elevation

Ground Moving Target Indication Using an InSAR System With a Hybrid Baseline